


pidge versus the multiverse

by nonbinarynino



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Reality, Dimension Travel, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Post-Canon, Timeline Shenanigans, Trans Female Character, Trans Pidge | Katie Holt, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-29 17:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonbinarynino/pseuds/nonbinarynino
Summary: Pidge shrieks, causing Lance to stumble back a few steps. “Why are youAltean?”Sure, the marks had been there before, but his ears had certainly not been that pointy.She’s completely ready to accept some explanation about it being similar to the marks on his face. Life is already weird, right? It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen to them.Which is why it completely fucking baffles her when he says, voice barely above a whisper, “why are younot?”(Or, the one where Pidge keeps involuntarily jumping in between alternate realities, and she just wants to figure out why.)





	1. you get used to it

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be crack. i don't know what happened but now it's sad and funny at the same time.
> 
> write me on tumblr: nonbinarynino

The sun hurts Pidge’s eyes when she wakes up. She groans, slinging an arm over her face. She’d been so sure that she’d closed the curtains last night, but maybe the wind had blown them back open…

Five more minutes never hurt anybody, right?

Except in this case, she _does_ kind of hurt. Her shoulders ache from the position that she’s in, and her pillow is itching her face. Hadn’t she thrown out her sequin pillow, like, three months ago? Why is she sleeping on it now?

Pidge blinks her eyes open, and then jolts. This isn’t her bedroom. This isn’t a _room_ at all. This is a field, full of long green grass and trees bigger than anything that she’s ever seen lining the edges. What the fuck?

She scrunches up her nose as she tries to recall the night before. She’d had dinner with Shiro and Curtis at their new place, and then had walked the short distance back to her parent’s house. She’d pet Bae Bae and pretty much gone straight to bed, disregarding the Netflix she’d watched to help her fall asleep. It’s not like she had been drinking or anything, (she’s only ever been drunk once, and that was in _space_ ) so there’s nothing to explain her new location.

“Matt, I swear, if this is one of your dumb fucking pranks,” she murmurs, getting up and brushing off her pants. At the very least, she’d been too lazy to change into her pajamas before crashing, so she’s in clothes that she doesn’t mind getting dirty. Maybe she can still scam Matt into buying her another pair of jeans, just for the trouble caused. She’s sure that he’d go along with it, since none of his pranks are ever done with harm in mind.

“Hello?” she calls out, pushing herself to her feet. There’s no immediate response, so she tries again. “Anyone around? Matt? Have you gotten enough footage for the inevitable prank video?”

Huh. Maybe she should just wander until she eventually finds civilization, but what if she goes the wrong way and ends up so deep in the woods that she can’t get back out? That’d suck, especially because a quick pat on her butt shows that she doesn’t have her phone on her.

 _Hey, quit that thinking,_ she scolds herself, finally settling on a direction and starting to walk. _You’re the Green Paladin. The woods should be a piece of cake._

( _Used to be,_ a traitorous part of her brain whispers. _You used to be the Green Paladin. You don’t count anymore._ )

Pidge sighs, shaky, and keeps going. The most confusing part is that when she looks at the area around her, it doesn’t look like it’s anywhere _near_ the Garrison. The trees tower so tall over her that she feels tiny, and if she _really_ squints in one direction, she can see what looks like an ocean. There’s no ocean near the Garrison! Just dirt, dirt, and more dirt.

 _Wait,_ she thinks. _What if my last memory isn’t my actual last memory? What if I got drugged or kidnapped or something and am on the other side of the continent?_

“ _Guys,_ ” she yells, louder this time as her confusion and annoyance turns into thinly-veiled panic. She gets her foot tangled in a bunch of juniberries and shakes out of it, displacing a few of them and getting dust on her sneaker. “This isn’t funny anymore!”

“Katie?” a voice sounds, and she relaxes immediately. The voice is familiar, but slightly hard to distinguish. It takes a moment for her to realize whose it is, but when she does, she practically collapses in relief.

“ _Lance_? Is that you?” It makes sense that the area that she’s in is Lance’s farm. She’s never actually been there before, so it would at least explain the strangeness of her surroundings. She has absolutely _no_ fucking idea how she ended up halfway across the country, but she can probably get answers from him.

“Katie! Keep talking so that I can find you!” Pidge flinches at the fact that he’s calling her Katie, since he’s literally _never_ done that before, but, well, she’s not exactly going to call him out on it. He’s been through a lot this year. They all have.

“I just woke up in the dirt,” she calls out, slowing her motions so that Lance can find her. “Which is like, _super_ weird, because I totally fell asleep in my bed and not anywhere _near_ here-” She cuts off when he stumbles into view, blinking at her with wide eyes.

He looks different than she remembers. It’s been _months_ since she’s seen him, and the last time, he had looked so worn thin. His smiles had been plastered on, his skincare routine long abandoned. The mere thought of it is so _uncharacteristic,_ but at least he looks better now. His Altean marks are glowing even harsher than she remembers them being, and he looks _happy_ in a way that he usually doesn’t. The tips of his ears are covered in freckles and -

Pidge shrieks, causing Lance to stumble back a few steps. “Why are you _Altean_?” Sure, the marks had been there before, but his ears had certainly not been that _pointy._

She’s completely ready to accept some explanation about it being similar to the marks on his face, or at the very least, something along those lines. Life is already weird, right? It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen to them.

Which is why it completely fucking baffles her when he says, voice barely above a whisper, “why are you _not_?”

Pidge blinks at him, once, twice, and then immediately twists around to survey her surroundings. The ocean in the distance, the juniberries that line the fields, the tall, towering trees. Everything clicks into place. She’s not at Lance’s farm; she’s on _Altea._

“Holy shit,” she says, voice soft in the realization. “I’m in an alternate reality, aren’t I?”

Lance, who looks so similar and yet so _different_ at the same time, swallows. He’s studying her similarly to the way that she’s studying him. “I guess so.” At least he doesn’t accuse her of being crazy and, like, take her to the queen or something. Huh, is Allura the queen? Honerva? Someone else entirely?

“Can you take me to your Pidge, then?” she asks, crossing her arms tight over her chest. She feels so, so far from home. “She’s gotta be around here somewhere, right?”

“My _what?”_

“Your Pidge! Your Katie!” God, she doesn’t even have the same nickname in this reality! She’s probably so boring. She almost begs Lance to _please_ tell her that she still likes science, but figures that she should probably give it another minute before terrorizing him further.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he agrees. “Um, I’m assuming you don’t know how to get to the castle, right?”

It’s not exactly like she can tell him that Altea has been destroyed for ten thousand years, so she just shrugs and says, “lead the way, dude.”

“Uh… what’s a _dude_?”

“Okay, nevermind.”

 

* * *

 

Pidge’s knees nearly give out when she sees the Altean version of herself.

They’re the same height, but the Altean’s hair is much longer, tied into intricate, flower-threaded braids that stop right around her hips. She’s deep in conversation with another Altean that Pidge cannot see the face of, and her eyes light up as she speaks. Her ears are pierced in multiple places, with bright, gold jewelry, in the same shade of the necklace that goes around her neck. And, most noticeably of all, she’s decked out in a dress _,_ green and lacy, tied with a ribbon around her waist.

“Holy shit,” Pidge wheezes, right there in the hallway. “She’s beautiful.”

Lance laughs quietly, placing a hand on her shoulder. “You get used to it.” He lets his hand fall away, as if it hasn’t just burned a hole into Pidge’s soul, and takes a step closer to the others. “Kateryna?” he says, and his voice just sounds so _gentle,_ as if he could spend his whole life just looking at her. “We, uh, we have a bit of a situation, here.”

Altean Pidge - _Kateryna_ \- turns, and then Pidge is looking at herself in the eye, and, okay, this is really weird. The person that she’d been talking to turns as well, and then Pidge is face-to-face with _Keith,_ except he has blue marks under his eyes and pointy fucking ears. He’s in formal wear, too, and now she’s wondering what type of event is going on. Maybe somebody’s getting married?

“Holy shit,” Pidge repeats. “Keith’s Altean, too?”

“What even _are_ you,” Keith asks, hand on his weapon. Kateryna whacks him on the shoulder as if to tell him to cut his shit out. “You don’t look like any race that I’ve seen before.”

“I’ll explain my entire life story in a bit,” Pidge promises, which doesn’t seem to sate Keith at all. Figures. “But can I sit down first? I’m having a weird day. Er, quintant. Wait, how can you guys understand me? I’m not speaking Altean, am I?”

Kateryna grins at her, and it’s so familiar that Pidge feels a little nauseous. They look the _same,_ which really should be coming as some sort of ego boost, considering how drop dead gorgeous Kateryna is, but it’s really just making her feel… insecure. As if she’s the ugliest person here and they all know it. Damn Alteans and their natural beauty.

“Come into my room,” Kateryna says, and even has the _audacity_ to punctuate it with a wink. Probably as a gesture of _we really are the same, so don’t worry._ “Let’s learn about each other.”

“Lady Kateryna,” Lance replies, awkwardly formal. “As intriguing as this is, we do have a prior engagement.”

Kateryna deflates, and Lance looks guilty for even bringing it up. “Oh, yeah. I completely forgot.” She opens her bedroom door, gesturing to let Pidge inside. “We have a funeral to attend, and, er, it’s probably best if you don’t come.”

“I gotcha,” Pidge assuages, waving her hand around as if to show that she’s not offended. She’s not sure if she should ask, but she forges ahead anyway, just in case it’s someone that she knows. “Um, can I ask whose funeral it is?”

The mood in the room shifts, and she almost says that it doesn’t matter anyway, but then she catches the look on Keith’s face. It’s _pained,_ as if he’s lost a limb instead of a friend. Almost as if the person had been family. And, well, it doesn’t take much to realize why that facial expression looks so familiar.

“Oh,” Pidge says, wishing for once that it hadn’t been so easy to connect the dots. “It’s Shiro, isn’t it?”

“Is he alive?” Keith asks, voice barely audible. “Where you’re from?”

“Yeah,” she confirms, even though she’s not sure if it’ll make the blow harsher or easier to bear. “Married, too. I just got back from dinner at his place when I showed up here.”

Keith looks at anywhere but her face. “Lady Kateryna, I’ll meet you at the ceremony,” he says, and he’s gone before Pidge can even apologize.

She frowns at her feet before stepping into Kateryna’s bedroom. “I hope the ceremony goes well,” she says, awkward. “Um, my condolences, too.”

“Wait here,” Kateryna replies, voice firm. “Do whatever you want, but stay here, okay?”

“Of course, yeah,” Pidge answers, waving her off. “I won’t cause trouble when you’re having a hard day already. Don’t worry.” She might be a bit more considerate because _she_ would be the one suffering the consequences, in a roundabout sort of way, but still. She’s not a _monster._

Plus, she’s still totally going to snoop.

Kateryna’s room is _huge._ The bed is bigger than Pidge’s entire dorm back at the Garrison, accessorized with long golden drapes and a highly detailed duvet. It’s _clean,_ too, which is the weirdest thing, but she supposes that every version of herself is probably at least a little different. Or, even weirder, Kateryna is clearly _loaded,_ so there might even be a maid that comes in and cleans it for her. Pidge would hate that, personally. She’d much rather have a messy room.

The curtains are drawn, at least, which hopefully points to Kateryna not being one of those weird people who likes to wake up early. There’s also a pile of blueprints on the table near her bed, except all of the numbers and letters are completely different from anything that Pidge has ever seen. She couldn’t decipher them even if she had all of her old Altean tech.

 _Maybe Allura will know,_ Pidge thinks. _Oh, wait, I’m in another reality, I can’t ask her._ It takes way too long to realize that her being in another reality isn’t the _only_ reason that she can’t ask Allura for help, and the grief that follows is suffocating. For just a moment, she had _forgotten._

She finds a picture album in one of the drawers and flips through it. There’s a bunch of pictures of Kateryna’s family, which is really weird. There’s someone who looks a little bit like her dad, and an older brother, but there’s also a baby in Kateryna’s father’s arms. She wonders if it’s a younger sibling or if one of them has had children. She can't tell which scenario is weirder.

After that, all of the pictures turn into Lance.

Pidge closes the book.

 

* * *

 

“Is Hunk Altean, too?” is the first thing out of Pidge’s mouth once the others get back. Keith has come back, too, but his face is puffy and red, so she doesn’t directly talk to him. She feels too bad.

“Hunk?” Kateryna asks, tilting her head to the side in consideration. There hadn’t been enough chairs in her room, so they’d all ended up on the floor. “Can you describe him?”

“Uh,” Pidge answers, quirking an eyebrow as she tries to figure out a way to describe him. _My very best friend that I adore_ probably won’t cut it. “Taller than Lance, muscular as hell, really good cook?”

“Oh, Huldenk!” Kateryna says, nodding, as if this makes things clearer. It does not. “He’s the castle chef!”

“Yeah, that’s probably him,” Pidge replies, fond. “He’s starting, like, a total culinary empire back home right now. I’m so proud of him.” She hesitates, looking around the room for who else isn’t there. Shiro, obviously, but she’s not rude enough to mention him. “What about Allura? Coran?”

“You mean the old queen and her royal advisor?” Lance butts in. It’s weird, seeing him not flinch at the mention of Allura’s name. “They’re, like, ten thousand years old. Still kicking, but they’re usually in the infirmary or helping out at the school. Why?”

“They were… younger, in my timeline,” is the answer that she settles on, eventually. “Well, kind of? They were born over ten thousand years ago, but… something bad happened to Altea. They were put in cryopods and were the only survivors from the whole planet. We met them when we ended up in space, and then… Allura died.” Tears burn in her eyes, unbidden, so she covers them with her hand. “Nothing’s been the same since.”

A hand touches her arm, the presence more of a comfort than she had truly expected. Pidge lets out one deep breath, before using her hand to wipe her eyes and putting it down. “I’m sorry,” she says, soft. “I really - I shouldn’t be crying, when you guys have had a shitty day already. It’s just so new. And she meant so much to all of us.”

“It’s okay,” Kateryna says, voice firm. “We’ve all been through rough times. Now, let’s try and figure out how to get you home, okay? Can you explain what happened before you got here?”

Pidge nods, the movements jerky. “I didn’t come here intentionally or anything. I was on Earth - my home planet - and I had just come home from dinner with - er, I’d just gotten back. I went to bed and woke up here. I ran into Lance, like, five minutes - doboshes - after.”

“You don’t need to translate,” Lance says, lips quirking up. “We all wear translators to deal with the royal visitors. We understand you.”

“Oh,” she replies, feeling rather stupid, even though there's no way that she possibly could have known. “Well, yeah. That’s pretty much it.”

“So it wasn’t intentional. Am I right to assume that you would have known if a rift had opened?”

“I’m sure that I would’ve known,” Pidge confirms. “I’ve been to an alternate reality before and the process was much… harsher. But, I mean, that must have been how I got here, right? There’s no other way that I can think of.”

“Well, we recently learned of something,” Kateryna explains, and her tone sounds so much like Pidge’s Garrison-report voice that it gives her a headache. “You can be… forced, into these realities, if something or someone thinks that you have something to learn.”

Pidge groans, resting her chin on the back of her hand. “Great, I’m being punished by ghosts. What do I even need to learn? _How_ would I even learn?”

“I do not think that this will be the only reality that you visit,” Kateryna says, and her smile is so _wistful_ that Pidge wonders if she’s been in a similar situation before. “My suggestion would be to look for the constant in all of the realities that you do visit. That’s a good place to start, no?”

Pidge opens her mouth to accuse Kateryna of knowing more than she’s letting on, but her brain is too busy scrambling for ideas. “Do you guys have Voltron?”

“Yes,” Kateryna confirms. “Though it has not been flown since the days of Alfor. Why?”

“I was a paladin,” Pidge replies, frowning, too disappointed to revel in how all of her companions look shocked at this new information. “I thought that maybe that was the constant. Us being the paladins.”

Kateryna _laughs,_ and Pidge’s head snaps up. Oh, she _definitely_ knows something. Has she been through it before? Does every Pidge have to go through some stupid time traveling ritual just to make God laugh? “I’m sure you’ll find out.” Ugh, that is  _not helpful._ What's the point in Pidge even  _being_ here anymore, if the other version of herself isn't going to help her out at all?

“You-” she starts, and then stops. Something weird is happening to her body. Her skin feels as though it is alight with a fire that she has never felt before, a warmth that ransacks her bones and leaves her immobile. She can only watch in horror has her hand _glitches,_ moving erratically, and then the room around her shifts. Like a disc that keeps skipping, the way that her surroundings disappear can only be described as unrefined.

For a terrifying, isolating moment, there’s absolutely nothing around her.

...

And then, there _isn't._


	2. i can't get over him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, cutie,” Lance says, oblivious to her internal panic. “Are you Matt and Pidge’s cousin or something? They never told me about you, but I’m sure you’ve heard loads about me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy new years everyone! much love.

When Pidge comes back to herself, she’s in the Garrison. The large, digital clock on the wall reveals that it’s half-past eleven in the morning on the date after Pidge had gone to Shiro’s house for dinner. She wonders if it’s in sync with the time back in her reality. Is time still ticking without her? Can nobody figure out where she is? If she spends too much time between realities, will she go missing back home? Or will it just be like a bad dream, ending with her waking up in her bed again?

The whole thought process gives her a headache. It’s just something that she’ll have to deal with when the time comes, so there’s no use in worrying about it now.

She tries to entertain the idea that maybe this _is_ her own reality, but quickly dismisses it. Back on Altea, Kateryna had spoken about the multiple realities as if she’d been through it before. (Though, maybe the constant is that they’ve all gone through this weird little test. She’ll have to ask this reality’s Pidge about it, if there is one.) Plus, why would she be in the _Garrison_ , and not in her bed like she had been to start?

Ugh. Who knows? Maybe she’s been tripping on some airborne drug all morning and somehow walked to the Garrison in her trance, and this has all been some fever dream. It wouldn’t be impossible.

Pidge checks her jeans, and sure enough, they’re covered in dirt and grass from the Altean field. This is _real,_ right?

 _Focus, Pidge,_ she reprimands, cursing herself for not taking her meds. Would it have even made a difference in another reality? _Agh, stop! Focus! You need to find this reality’s Pidge. Where would you be?_

The answer to that is probably in the greenhouse helping her mother, assuming that she’s still grounded for going across space and time. She looks like she’s near the medical wing, so if the blueprints are the same, she’ll have to make a left, a right, and then another-

She bumps right into somebody before she even makes any progress. “Oh, sorry,” she says automatically, looking up to see who it is. It’s Matt, who looks exactly the way he had when she’d seen him two days ago. Hair cut short, scar on his face. At the very least, it’s a confirmation that most of this reality’s events line up with hers.

Until, well, he jumps back, pointing a finger right into Pidge’s face, _screeching_ all the while. Ugh, she hadn't known that it was _this_ alarming when she had shrieked in Altean Lance's face earlier. She almost feels guilty about it. “What the fuck? What the shit? _Pidge?_ What the hell happened to you?”

“Um,” Pidge replies, always the eloquent one. “Look, I can explain. Can you take me to, um, me?”

Matt gapes at her for a moment. “Holy shit,” he says, in a tone not unlike the one that she’d used multiple times recently. He’s surely connected the dots by now, given his experiences with time and space himself. “You’re from another _reality,_ aren’t you? You need to tell me all about it! Oh, and Pidge - my Pidge - is going to think that this is _so_ cool! C’mon!” He’s taking her hand before she can even answer, dragging her through the corridors that she had just been about to traverse alone.

They pass a few people on the way, but she doesn’t make eye contact with any of them. The less people that her friends will have to explain the multiverse to, the better. She wonders how many of them look exactly the same, and how many people look different. Does Lance still have his Altean marks? Does Keith still have his mullet?

Matt doesn’t end up taking her to the greenhouse, but to the dining hall. He yanks her through the threshold, scanning the area for the others. “Guys,” he shouts, voice high with excitement. “I found another Pidge!” Pidge peers out from behind him, seeing Hunk and a version of herself. Except, when the other Pidge turns, she sees one stark difference.

“Woah,” she says. “You’re a dude!”

The other Pidge doesn’t look too much different than she does, in all honesty. He's a little taller than her, but not by much, and his jaw is a little wider, his bone structure a little sharper. But their color schemes are the same, and it’s pretty obvious to tell who she’s looking at.

“Woah,” the other Pidge repeats, his voice _astronomically_ lower than Pidge had been expecting. The surprise must show on her face, because he laughs. “Come sit! I have so many questions!”

“You and me both,” Pidge mumbles, going down to slide into the seat next to Hunk as Matt goes to sit next to the other Pidge. When she does, she pats him on the shoulder. “You look just as handsome as you always do, buddy. You still doing okay?”

Hunk looks frozen for a moment, as if coming to terms with the fact that there are two versions of his close friend right in front of him, but then he grins. “Yeah, I’m great! Thanks, Cute Pidge!”

“ _Hey,_ ” Other Pidge says, mockingly insulted. (She really needs to think of another name for him, but nothing else fits.) “I’m cute, too!” Matt noogies him, and it's so  _familiar,_ weirdly enough. It's like watching a video of herself, just with some of the details blurred.

“Is Shiro around?” Pidge asks, looking around the dining hall. She doesn't really recognize anybody else, though she sees the back of someone that looks kind of like James Griffin. “In my reality, he still works at the Garrison.”

“He’s around here somewhere,” Matt says with a shrug. “He and Curtis are working on some top secret project, but we’re half convinced that they’re just making out the whole time. Keith still with the Blades for you?”

“Yeah,” Pidge confirms. The next words that come out of her mouth are heavy, filled with anxiety at what the answer to her question will be. “Is Allura… is she still…?"

At their sad gazes, she doesn’t even finish. “So I guess that means that Lance is isolating himself from everyone, right?”

“Wait, what?” Hunk asks, confused. “Lance is five minutes late to lunch, sure, but he’s on his way right now.”

“Wait, he’s _here_?” Pidge demands. Had he gotten over Allura sooner in this reality? Or at least dealt with her death differently? “He’s not off on some random farm, isolating himself and saying that it’s in Allura’s name? Were they even together in this reality?”

“Lance and Allura were _dating_ in your reality?” Matt asks, voice full of disbelief. Huh. She can only wonder what had happened to cause _that_ chain of events to stop short. Had Lance already had a crush on somebody else when they went to space or something? “What the _fuck_?”

“In the last reality I was in, Allura was an old woman that I didn’t even get to meet,” Pidge replies, momentarily resting her forehead on the table in defeat. “So trust me, things could be weirder.”

“This isn’t the first reality that you’ve been in?” Other Pidge asks, curious. “I mean, besides the one with Sven back in space? That's the only one we've ever been to.”

Feeling hopeless at the reveal of her all-Pidges-go-through-this theory being incorrect, she gives them the run-down, then, about the Altean reality and Kateryna’s theories about the reasoning for her journey into the multiverse. “I’m trying to figure out what one of the constants could be, but since I’ve only been to two, it could be _anything_ ,” she complains. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“I would keep a running list of theories that you can cross off as you go,” Other Pidge advises. “Though, actually, would any sort of physical list be able to make it with you when you ‘glitch’?”

“I think so,” Pidge replies, though she’s not completely sure. “I mean, I have green stains on my jeans from the Altean reality right now, so it's not like I'm resetting.”

“Interesting. The fact that you can travel through these realities without a rift is really bizarre. I wonder if I could manufacture a-”

“I was thinking about it, but Kateryna made it seem like there were only two main ways to-”

“Two of them,” Hunk whispers, as though he hasn't danced to this song with Pidge many, many times. “Matt, there’s _two of them._ "

“It’s terrifying,” Matt agrees, though he sounds awfully pleased.

The two of them are so wrapped up in their own conversation that they don’t really notice the person sitting down on the other side of Other Pidge (what a mouthful) until it’s too late. Pidge looks up, bracing for impact, completely unprepared to see Lance there.

He looks good. He clearly hasn’t abandoned his skincare routine like he has in Pidge’s reality, and his eyes don’t have bags beneath them. His skin is clear of Altean marks, and she _aches_ to reach out to touch the skin there, but she doesn’t. She keeps her arms folded tightly against her chest.

It almost feels as though he’ll disappear if she touches him. He feels more _real_ than Altean Lance did, but also like he’ll vanish more easily. It doesn’t make much sense to even her mind, but it’s concrete enough of a fear to root her to her spot.

“Hey, cutie,” Lance says, oblivious to her internal panic. “Are you Matt and Pidge’s cousin or something? They never told me about you, but I’m sure you’ve heard loads about me.”

_Oh my God._

“Actually, I’m-”

“She’s our cousin on our mom’s side,” Matt finishes smoothly. Other Pidge’s shoulders silently shake with laughter, not calling his brother out on the lie. “Wanna introduce yourself, cuz?”

Pidge rolls her eyes, but doesn’t break out of character. It’s not like it will matter a few hours from now, anyway. “I’m Katie,” she says, reaching her hand out for Lance to shake. Instead of doing so, he takes her hand and kisses the back of it. She opens her mouth to say _you’re the one who got himself tied to that tree that one time, right?_ but thinks better of it. Even though this Lance seems more put together than her Lance, he’s obviously been through hell, just like the rest of them have, and, well, everyone likes an ego boost. “You’re the sharpshooter, right?” she asks, tilting her head as she pretends to consider him. “That’s pretty impressive, if you ask me.”

Lance _flushes,_ hand going to scratch the back of his neck. “Ah, well, uh… hey, did you know that they call me the Tailor?”

Hunk and other Pidge both just groan, but Matt still looks thrilled at how all of this is going. Especially when Pidge smiles innocently and goes, “oh, why? Is it because of how well you thread the needle?”

It’s so hard to say the line without cringing, but, well, anything to make her friends happy.

Which is a mindset that she’s literally _never_ had, to be completely honest, but it’s pretty fun, altering her personality when she knows that there won’t be any consequences. It’s just for kicks, and it’s not like anybody’s getting hurt, right?

( _Except for you,_ her mind tells her. _You’re getting hurt, because you know that your Lance back home will never look at you like this, will never_ love _you the way that you love him._ )

Lance stammers out a response, officially rendered useless, and quickly goes back to eating his food. “You’re evil in the best way possible,” Hunk whispers to her, and, well, that just makes her feel even better.

 

* * *

 

“We should start simple,” Other Pidge says. “Even if it seems like it’s so obvious or useless that it wouldn’t be important enough to be a constant, it could lead to a larger discovery.” As if to further explain his comments, he writes down all of their names on the list, along with the word _Altea_ and _Voltron._

“Juniberries,” Pidge suggests, even though it does seem quite mediocre. “We’ve been cultivating them on Earth, right?”

Other Pidge scrawls it next on the list. “Yeah,” he confirms. “Mom and I, maybe. Allura and Romelle used to help.” He frowns, sharp and at nothing. “Romelle stopped doing much of anything after Allura died.”

“Why?” Pidge asks, curious, before realizing that it’s probably a pretty rude thing to ask. But then again, the only person that she’d be offending here is herself. “Romelle’s broken up about it in my reality, sure, but she’s functioning.”

“Their love was… magnificent,” he explains, voice quiet. “They fell in love so hard and so fast, and they were going to found a new Altea together. It was beautiful, but then Allura…” He grips his pencil so tightly that Pidge worries that it will break. “Romelle’s been inconsolable. Much like your Lance has been, I suppose.”

“Death is hard,” Pidge says, redundant but accurate. “I still wake up in the mornings wondering if I’m going to hear Allura’s voice over the intercoms, telling us all to get out of bed. I would give anything to hear that again.”

“Me too,” Other Pidge agrees. “I miss her so much.”

They lapse into a comfortable silence for a moment, before Pidge, alight with a new idea, bursts, “gender and sexuality?”

“What?”

“I’m a bi trans girl,” Pidge explains. She hadn’t gotten around to asking Kateryna, but it would make sense, right? If this whole thing was about her learning to love herself or something? She already has, for the most part, but sometimes dysphoria strangles her and leaves nothing left. “Are you a bi trans guy?”

“No,” Other Pidge says, though to his credit, he doesn’t sound very put off by Pidge’s dramatic coming out. “I’m just gay. And, uh, cis? That’s the term?”

“Yeah, that’s the term,” Pidge confirms, blowing a raspberry at the ugly ceiling of the Garrison. Rats. She’d thought that she’d been onto something for a second there. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” Other Pidge repeats. “Why? Do you think that the constant is us being lonely and single?”

“Christ, I sure hope not,” Pidge mutters. “That would ruin my confidence for the rest of my life - oh my God, are you _adding_ it to the list?”

“We added _juniberries_ to this list,” is his answer, and she can practically feel him rolling his eyes at her, even though she’s staring at the ceiling and not at him. “If the constant is us being single, it’s at least pretty significant, right? Someone or something is trying to tell you to get your act together and do some flirting?”

“Ugh, stop being right,” Pidge says, which is something she _never_ thought that she would say to herself, but here she is. “What’s stopping you, anyway? No cute gay guys at the Garrison?”

“There are a few,” Other Pidge admits, and there’s an awkward tension in the air that wasn’t there a second ago. “It’s just, uh… Lance.”

“Lance,” Pidge repeats, and she really shouldn’t be as surprised as she is. “Man, me too. Mine’s mourning, but why aren’t you going for it?”

“He’s straight,” he says, the answer practically a groan.

“Wait, really?” Pidge asks, raising an eyebrow. Lance being straight in this reality doesn’t come as much of a surprise, to be honest, but she supposes that she had kind of figured that if this Pidge was a gay guy, the others might have different sexualities, as well. It’s kind of weird, having him be the only one who’s different, but she supposes that if she _is_ being taught some sort of lesson, it would make sense for the alterations to revolve around her.

“Is he not for you?” Other Pidge asks. “Ugh, if he’s not, we should totally swap. More beneficial for both of us.”

“I dunno,” Pidge admits, because she truly doesn’t. She doesn’t really make a habit of asking her teammates personal questions. She usually just figures shit out on her own, anyway. “I never asked.”

“I can’t get over him,” he whines, just as dramatic as she can be. “I don’t know what to do!”

“You should tell him,” she blurts, and she doesn’t even really comprehend how much she stands by the answer until it’s already been spoken into existence. “I know it’s not that easy, trust me, but… it would give you closure. And you _know_ that he wouldn’t make fun of you, not if it was about something serious like this. The worst he would do is an  _oh, of course you can’t resist my charms._ ”

His responding laugh is as weak as her Lance impersonation. “I know,” he admits. “Matt’s been on my case about it for months. I just don’t want to mess anything up.”

“You won’t,” Pidge promises. Even though she can’t truly know that for sure, she likes to think that she knows Lance inside and out. “If things change, it’ll be for the _better,_ because you won’t be hiding something really big anymore.”

“Ew, stop being good at pep talks,” Other Pidge says, throwing his pen at her. It hits her right on the nose, but it doesn’t hurt too much. “It’s gross.”

“I know, I’m _disgusting,_ ” she replies, jokingly shielding herself from blows that will never come. “That’s the only pep talk that I’ve, like, _ever_ given, and it was horrible. Please never talk to me again.”

“I probably _won’t,_ ” he answers with a snort. “You said you were only in the other reality for like, three hours, right? It’s already bordering that for us.”

“Huh,” Pidge says. “Well, if the constant _is_ me being lonely and single, maybe I can go home now, right? I’ll just make a Tinder or something and force myself to go out with someone.”

“Sounds horrible,” Other Pidge responds. “Have fun.”

“I won’t.”

 

* * *

 

Pidge doesn’t really feel like peeing her pants while glitching through space and time, so she makes a pit stop at the bathroom before she can disappear. When she exits, she spots Hunk and Lance chatting while walking down the hallway. When they spot her, Hunk waves, but Lance says something quickly to him and then starts walking over.

She is so unprepared for this. She hasn’t even had any time to give her Valley Girl accent a whirl!

“Hey, Katie,” he greets, brushing off his hands on the pants of his uniform. “How are you doing?”

“I’m pretty good,” she says, even though she’s truly anything but. Once she finally gets back to her own reality, she’s going to sleep for a _month._ “How about you?”

“Me?” Lance asks, as if he truly had not been expecting her to return the basic pleasantry. “Oh, I’m great! Awesome, even!”

 _He’s nervous,_ Pidge notes, lips quirking upwards. _Cute._

“That’s good,” she says, slow. Is he nervous _because_ of her? Maybe he found out about the prank and is awkwardly trying to tell her that the flirting had been weird or something. “Well, it was nice chatting with-”

“ _Wait,_ ” he cries, loud enough that it hurts her ears. “Oh, sorry, I just, I mean - wait.” It’s much too soft the second time that he says it, as if he’s trying to average the two attempts into something bearable. “I was wondering if you would, er, if you’d want to…”

Pidge blinks at him, waiting, but makes no move to put him out of his misery, partially because she has no idea what he’s about to say.

“Go on a date with me,” he finishes, rushed in his enthusiasm. He probably takes note of Pidge’s surprised expression, shown by the fact that his next words are rushed and panicked. “I mean! If you want! I get done here at six, and we could go on a walk around town?”

Oh.

Huh.

Why does this _hurt?_

“Oh, uh,” Pidge says, scrambling to find an answer that’s not a lie, but isn’t the truth either. “Trust me, that sounds great,” is what she ends up saying after a moment’s hesitation. “But I’m leaving town, like, within the next hour? And I’m not sure when I’m coming back, so...”

Lance’s face falls, and she _hates_ the sight of it, so she quickly adds on, “but, hey, when I’m around again, if you’re still interested, I’d love to!”

He smiles, then, paired with a blush, and it just seems so _honest._ “Oh, that’d be great,” he says, the rapid movements of his hands displaying the nervousness that his voice doesn’t portray. “I, uh, I look forward to it! I’ll see you around!” Just like that, he’s gone, speed walking back to Hunk and continuing in the other direction.

Pidge breathes in and out, trying to calm herself down. She’s never coming back, and she knows that. She wouldn’t want to, even if she could. Going on a date with the Lance from this reality, while another version of _herself_ was pining after him? That would just be cruel.

She’ll never see this version of Lance again. Carefree, happy, moving on after the suffering that they’d all endured.

It had been a pretty lie, at least.

 

* * *

 

(This time, when the glitches start, she doesn’t panic. She just closes her eyes and waits it out.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no concrit pleaseeeeeee
> 
> (this isnt a fic about pidge being trans, pidge just happens to be trans. if i ever do write a fic explicitly about pidge being trans i’ll have to do a lotta research lol. so don’t worry about dysphoria/etc being a trigger because that never comes up.)


	3. we're so domestic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge should remember that she’s, more or less, occupying this space with strangers. She has no idea how they differ from the friends that she loves, and if those differences are drastic enough to cause her any harm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's a bit... sad. the next one is, too! but then it gets happier! maybe!
> 
> [also, i just want to say that any ships that happen in these realities are meant to show how different the worlds can be, and it's not in any way going to impact the endgame ship so don't get mad at me ok bye]

Pidge wakes up slowly, sleep refusing to let her go until the last possible moment. She yawns, the delicate sound being prominent in the quiet room. For a moment, she can pretend that she’s just in her bed at her family’s house, and not in some new location. Last time, she hadn’t even been sleeping, she’d just appeared in a Garrison hallway, so this is at least a bit more comfortable.

She procrastinates opening her eyes, knowing that once she does, she’ll have to come to terms with her situation. There will be no more pretending. Where will she be this time? Another foreign planet? The space mall? A boat in the middle of the ocean, with her friends as fellow sailors? She snorts at the thought, eyes flicking open.

Huh.

This isn’t what she’d expected.

Even without all of the clutter, it’s pretty obvious that it’s one of the rooms on the Castle of Lions. The walls and ceiling are the same medical white, the bed more like a cot than anything else. She can almost picture where she used to keep all of her posters and keepsakes, even though the room is bare.

Well, it’s not _completely_ bare. When she turns, she sees a folded-up note lying next to her on the bed.

_Hey there -_   
_You’re in an alternate reality. Don’t freak out! (Okay, you can freak out a little!)_   
_We’ll explain everything when you wake up! We’re in the lounge - hopefully you know where that is!_   
_Signed,  
You_

Despite the situation, Pidge finds herself grinning. This reality’s version has the same bad handwriting as the last one. She’s pretty sure that that’s not the constant that she’s supposed to be looking for, but it’s a pretty funny one.

 _That’s cute,_ she thinks. _I’m looking out for me!_

She wonders, absently, how this version of her will be different. They’ll probably be human, considering the fact that they could recognize Pidge, but gender is up in the air. Maybe they don’t even have the same name.

Oh, well. As tiring as it is teleporting through time and space, it is pretty cool learning about the other versions of herself. Kateryna, who had been regal and yet, still Pidge. Other Pidge, (who she might have to just start lovingly calling OP for clarity) who’d been so much _like_ her, the only notable difference being the surface ones.

She knows for sure that the version of her in this reality is kind, at that’s all that really matters. If there’s a version of her out there where she’s a horrible person, Pidge hopes that she doesn’t come into contact with them. That would be a mood killer if there ever was one.

When she gets up, she notes to herself that she’s _still_ in these fucking jeans. It seems that time is passing in some way, because she definitely did not smell this awful two realities ago. But that’s fine, she supposes- there’s sure to be a change of clothes on the Castle, right?

How is she even _on_ the Castle? Did she go back in time? Back to before they knew that Shiro was a clone? Because if so, jeez, maybe she’ll have to give her friends some pointers. _I know he seems legit, but you can’t trust him!_ Like that would go over well.

Pidge stumbles out of her room, peering down the corridor. Okay, so it hadn’t technically been the same room that she’d used to stay in - she’d always slept further down the hall, presumably where this reality’s Pidge sleeps. That correlates, at least, so that’s good. Less information to digest. However, the walls are of a slightly different make - they look newer than they usually do, and cleaner, too.

She keeps her tiptoes quiet as she treks down the hall, not wanting to startle anybody. She should remember that she’s, more or less, occupying this space with strangers. She has no idea how they differ from the friends that she loves, and if those differences are drastic enough to cause her any harm.

 _It’ll be fine,_ Pidge promises herself. _You’re here for a reason, and whoever forced this weird adventure upon you isn’t going to let you die. If you do die, then, well, maybe it won’t be permanent._

See! Positive thinking! It works wonders.

(Her legs still feel shaky, though.)

She nears the corner that leads into the lounge, hesitating before she can turn through the threshold. She feels a lot more put on the spot than she had in the last timeline, but at least it’s in a familiar setting, right? She has that going for her. It’ll be fine. She’s a badass, she can handle anything. She won’t even freak out.

Pidge turns the corner, wringing her hands together as she walks into the room. Four heads snap up to meet her, and she gawks in response.

They’re older than she is, by at least a good five years. An older version of herself stands up when she walks in: slightly taller, longer hair, with clothing that actually fits her instead of being baggy and old. Next to her is Keith, whose hair is _braided,_ his old red jacket abandoned for a leather jacket instead. Then there’s Shiro, looking good with white hair and all, (which points to the whole clone thing having already happened, so, like, thank God that she doesn’t have to be the bearer of bad news) and then Hunk, who looks as soft as ever, despite the fact that he looks like he has recently gained the ability to throw her down the stairs.

“Are you kidding me,” she says, voice unnecessarily high-pitched. “Why do you all get _hot_?”

At the very least, Lance isn’t here. She doesn’t know what she’d do if faced with an older, hotter version of him. She’d probably just die on the spot, right here in the lounge.

Promptly, she realizes what she’d just said, and immediately buries her head into her hands. “I did not just say that,” she says. “This is the worst day of my life.” Not really - it doesn't even make the top five, actually. Maybe the top twenty.

“She’s as dramatic as you are,” Keith whispers, presumably to her older self. “Some things never change, right?”

“You just made fun of two Pidges at once,” Hunk replies. “That’s gotta be a new record or something.”

Pidge drags her face out of her hands, eyeing them all with slight caution. It’s not so much that she thinks that they’ll hurt her, no, she just doesn’t want to be made fun of by hotter versions of her friends. That sounds like a very specific type of hell. “Uh, hi,” she says, after a moment. “I’m Pidge.”

“I’m also Pidge,” the other version of herself says, smiling. “I go by Katie now, though, so that might be easier.”

Right. Katie. That’s something better to call her than Other Pidge. “Cool,” she says, even though nothing is cool at all. “Is it just, like, the four of you?”

“No,” a new voice says, and Pidge is choking before she even turns her head back towards the door. Allura doesn’t look too different than she had the last time they’d seen each other. Alteans do age much more slowly, so that makes sense.

She looks as gorgeous as she had the last time that Pidge had seen her.

“ _Allura,_ ” she says, voice absolutely wrecked, and charges her. Allura only has time to stiffen slightly before Pidge is wrapping her arms around her shoulders and burying her face into her neck. “You’re _alive,_ ” she wails, feeling tension seep out of her body when Allura finally hugs her back. “You died, I watched you die, and no one’s been the same! You died and now Coran stopped making jokes and Lance never talks to any of us anymore, and, and - you _died_!”

“It’s alright,” Allura answers, rubbing soothing circles into her back. “The past is the past. I’m here now.”

When Pidge finally lets go, she spends a handful of moments just trying to calm the tears that won’t stop leaving her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to freak out, it’s just… in the last reality I was in, you were dead, too. And in the one before that, you were like, wicked old, and I didn’t even meet you! I thought that I would never see you again!”

“You’ve been to other realities, and recently?” Hunk’s voice cuts through. “Why are you dimension hopping?”

“I dunno,” she confesses, turning to look at him. Part of her wants to go and snuggle with her best friend, but she figures that that would be a weird thing to do. “I don’t have a choice in the matter. I just _glitch_ out with no warning and end up somewhere else. This is my third one. In the last one, I was a boy, and in the one before that, we were all Altean. Which, by the way, I’m not usually insecure, but being around all of them was being the ugliest person in the room by _default._ And now it’s happening _again._ So like, fuck my life.”

“Pidge,” Allura scolds, and it sounds so _familiar_ and _warm_ and, God, part of Pidge wishes that she could stay here forever. “Don’t talk about yourself like that!”

Pidge just huffs in response. “Anyway - long story short, in the Altean reality, the version of me was weirdly all-knowing, and I’m, like, 90% sure she’s been through what I’m going through. She said that I have to look for the one constant in all the timelines.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Katie asks. Pidge shrugs, moving over to sit on the end of the couch, seeing that it’s the one place where she can actually kind of face the others. Allura sits down next to her, and her presence is radiant in a way that she had almost forgotten it always could be.

“Not really,” she admits. “Me and the last Pidge kind of got one, but it was more of a joke than anything.”

Katie shrugs, not seeming to find any fault with this. “Tell me anyway. At the very least, I can dispute it.”

“Any chance you’re miserably single?” she asks, voice dry. “Because if you’re not, then I’m outta ideas.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, and then they’re all laughing. Pidge groans, resting her head against the back of the couch. “I told you that it was a joke-”

“I’m not laughing because it’s a bad theory,” Katie says, shaking her head vehemently. “I _can_ dispute it, though.” She lifts up her left hand, and -

There’s a engagement ring. It’s _huge,_ and a bright, ruby red. Pidge gapes at it for a second, before the color scheme makes sense, and then she’s staring at Keith.

“What.”

“Er,” Keith starts, shrugging, as if this isn’t _life-altering_ news. He seems put off by the fact that she had figured it out without either of them saying anything. “This information doesn’t have to affect anything for you. Different realities, different people, right?”

Pidge closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and then she’s cracking up, too. She laughs so hard that her lungs ache. “I’m _sorry,_ ” she gasps out again, once the worst of it is over. “I don’t mean to be rude - you’re great in my timeline, too - it’s just that that’s the most _random_ thing that I’ve ever fucking _heard._ Keith never talks about romance or anything. I don’t even think he _gets_ crushes.”

“I used to think that about this Keith,” Katie says, fond, “but then I found out that he’d just had a big stupid crush on me that he couldn’t articulate.”

Pidge gapes. That’s _gotta_ be just this reality, right? There’s no way that her Keith back home has _feelings_ for her. Keith doesn’t get crushes! Keith just beats people up! “Oh, shit.”

“I feel like I should be telling you not to swear,” Shiro says. “Should I be telling you not to swear?”

“Dude, I’ll be here for like, five hours max, and then I’m probably _gone,_ ” Pidge answers, voice rushed in the same emotional whirlwind of her last ramble. “You can try, but it won’t do anything.”

“What am I like?” Keith asks, and Pidge wonders if he’s trying to figure out if her Keith has feelings for her or not. This whole situation is just so _bizarre_. “In your timeline?”

Pidge frowns, her mental list of adjectives refreshing as she tries to find some that would fit Keith. “Uh… you’re strong. Hotheaded. A little emotionally constipated. You _care,_ definitely, it’s just that you’re not that great at showing it. We hang out a bunch, though, when you’re not on missions for the Blade.”

Keith startles. “The _Blade_? I’m part of the _Blade_ in your reality?”

“Uh, yeah?” Pidge asks, a bit surprised at this difference. “Don’t tell me that you’re not half-Galra in this timeline.”

“No, I am,” Keith says, frowning. “But I have a war to fight here, with Voltron. I wouldn’t leave that to join another organization.”

Pidge snaps up so hard that her head gets a little dizzy. “ _Wait,_ ” she exclaims, the pieces slotting together, “you guys are _still fighting_ the war? How many _years_ has it been?”

“It’s over for you?” Shiro asks, clearly surprised by this. How long have they been fighting? How many lives have been lost? “We’ve been fighting this for six years.”

“Woah,” Pidge says. “We won almost a year ago. Allura… Allura sacrificed herself so that we could all live.”

Allura places a hand on her upper back, as if to remind Pidge of her presence. It works quite well, but it also makes another light bulb go off in her head.

“What happened to Lance?” she asks, and it’s the scariest question that she’s ever asked. “Is he-?”

“Four years ago,” Katie says, voice incredibly gentle, as if _Pidge_ is the one who had lost him, “he got into a sticky situation that he couldn’t get out of. It was him or us, and he chose us. There was nothing that we could do.”

Pidge blinks away runaway tears. Why does the idea of someone else’s Lance dying even _bother_ her so much? Hers is safe at home. Alienated and unintentionally cold, sure, but _alive._ “Stupid Lance,” she says, even though the insult seems more sad than anything else. “Of course he’d go out like that, the hero.”

She misses the knowing, sympathetic look that Katie shares with the others.

 

* * *

 

It’s not that Pidge means to snoop, it’s just that she also didn’t mean to _not_ snoop. It’s one of those things that just kind of happens, and from that point forward, it’s just go hard or go home.

Pidge has always been a fan of going hard.

They had apparently found her unconscious outside of Lance’s room, so that _must_ have been some sort of sign, right? She just wants to see what it looks like. Does it still have all of his old belongings, or had they cleaned it out with time? Will it be nothing but old boxes and folded clothes?

In the end, it’s a mix of all of those. It doesn’t look quite like the room that Lance used to have, but it’s similar. There are pictures of his family and friends still on the walls, though some have fallen to the floor. Some of the articles of clothing that he’d gotten from different planets - an Olkarion tunic, a Balmeran set of gloves - are the exact same as what _her_ Lance has. Some other stuff, like a scarf and a few necklaces, are things that she’s never seen before.

Most notably, there’s a box on the bed. Pidge rustles through it without truly meaning to find anything, but she does anyway. A dozen sets of tapes, all labeled by date and with no other moniker. There’s a video player on the bed, too, and, well…

What’s a girl to do?

 

* * *

 

[Recording...]

The camera shows Lance, who is opening up a panel on Red’s back. He looks to be heavily concentrated, not noticing the cameraman as they get closer and closer to him.

“Hey, hot stuff!” comes cheerily from off-screen, in what is clearly Katie’s voice. Lance jolts, wrench falling out of his hands and clattering to the floor. However, when he turns to glare at the camera, there is clearly no heat behind it.

“Whatcha got there, babe?” he asks, bending over to pick up the wrench, laughing at the ensuing wolf-whistle. “Are we daily vloggers now?”

“Um, obviously,” says Katie, still off-screen. “Nah, just kidding. It’s much more important than that. What if you get amnesia and forget how hot you look while working on Red?”

“Oh, well that would _clearly_ be a tragedy,” he responds, his words highly sarcastic. He’s grinning, though, as if this whole situation is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to him.

[Click…]

 

* * *

 

[Recording…]

The camera opens to Lance, who looks to be holding the camera backwards and squinting into the lends. “Hey, daily vlogger Lance here,” he teases, adding a pout for flair. “Today’s episode of Life with Lance and Katie includes… drum roll please…”

The camera turns so that instead of Lance, it shows Katie, asleep at her workstation. She’s face-down, forehead pressed against an open book. “This is the third time this week,” Lance’s voice comes, quiet and now off-screen. “She is _so_ lucky that I’m in love with her. A lesser man would leave her to feel stiff and cranky tomorrow.”

[Click…]

 

* * *

 

[Recording…]

The camera shows a mirror, reflecting Katie and Lance. Lance is brushing his teeth, humming along to an unfamiliar tune while he does so. The camera repetitively zooms in and out of his face, and every time, he makes a progressively more ridiculous expression, emitting giggles from Katie.

“We’re so domestic,” she huffs, aiming the camera so that it’s more focused on her reflection. She poses dramatically, hand on her hip. “It’s absolutely disgusting. I’m going to start bleeding sugar.”

Through his toothbrush, Lance makes a shocked noise, before spitting his toothpaste into the sink. “Okay, _first_ of all, _ow,_ ” he says. Katie is mid-cackle when the video ends.

[Click…]

 

* * *

 

[Recording…]

The final video is almost completely pitch black. Some shapes and colors are able to be made out, but the majority of it is unclear. Loud, feminine sobbing echoes throughout the background, not stopping for as long as the video plays.

The camera shifts, one of the larger shapes revealed to be the wood of a cross. There are letters carved into the wood, but the only visible ones are _LAN._

The video cuts off without warning.

[Click…]

 

* * *

 

Pidge stares at her hands for a long time after the videos end. Maybe snooping hadn’t been that good of an idea after all. Katie and Keith are clearly happy together, but… Katie had been happy with _Lance,_ too. And then he’d died.

But Katie had moved on, with time. She’d healed. She and Keith are _engaged,_ for crying out loud! That’s serious! Hunk, Shiro, and Allura had seemed _sad_ when Lance’s death had been brought up, but it had been _years_ -

Wait. Pidge's brain repeats the last sentence over in her head, trying to figure out why all of the names tick off some type of box.

Shiro. Allura. Lance.

Shiro, Allura, Lance.

Holy shit.

Pidge knows what the constant is.

 

* * *

 

( _I don’t want to be here anymore,_ she thinks, hands trembling. _Get me out, get me out, get me out!_ The glitch happens instantaneously, almost as if it had been waiting for her to want to leave.)


	4. you and i weren't...?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance looks downright _murderous._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like i should mention at some point that i know the voltron verse probably doesn't have netflix/etc at this point but i have a permit [i do what i want]

When Pidge regains consciousness, she’s falling. She barely has enough time to register that fact before she’s slamming into the ground, hard enough to bruise.

“Mother _fucker,_ ” she groans, pulling her knees to her chest. They burn, but not enough for them to be broken, which is good. She is getting _so_ exhausted of this timeline hopping business. She just wants to go home! Can’t whatever lesson she needs to learn also be explained through a rather descriptive PowerPoint or something? Anything would be preferable to this.

At first, she thinks that she's alone, but then a voice sounds throughout the area. “Hello? Who’s there?” It's shockingly loud, portraying a close proximity that doesn't quite make sense, causing Pidge to let out a squeak. The grass is so tall here that her sitting down completely masks her view, so she can't see anybody. Ugh, she should get up soon, even though her legs hurt. She doesn’t want interdimensional ticks.

So, after just a moment of collecting herself, she stands up, brushing off her jeans. Wow, they are absolutely _disgusting_ at this point. She probably looks like hell. “Um, hey, my name’s Pidge,” she calls, trying to locate the other voice. No matter where she looks, she can’t. She's supposed to be the stealthy one, here. “Can I have some help? I’m a bit… lost.”

“What’d you say your name was?” The voice is familiar, now that she thinks about it. She just can’t figure out _why._ She’s never been too good at audio recognition, not if she doesn’t have a visual to match. Especially now that her head is throbbing from the space travel.

“Pidge,” she repeats, awkwardly shuffling her feet back and forth. “It’s weird, I know, but - _eek_!”

Something flies in the air, dangerously close and extremely accurate. Pidge ducks in time, thank fuck, but barely escapes with her head in tact. She whips around in the direction of where the projectile came from, seeing-

Lance, standing just a few feet behind her. His arms are crossed tightly over his chest, seemingly so out of place in regards to the luscious field around them. She has half a mind to ask him where the hell he even  _came_ from, but it dies in her throat when she gets a good look at him.

He looks downright _murderous._

 _Fuck,_ Pidge thinks, frozen in place. _Oh, no, no, no. Did I murder Lance’s family in this timeline or something? Why does he look like he wants to eat my spleen?_

“Look,” she tries, desperate to wipe that terrifying expression off of his face, “whatever you’re thinking that caused you to throw a spade at me, I’m not who you think I am! I need help.”

“Oh, trust me,” Lance grits out, “I know you’re not Pidge. I just wanna know why you’re _pretending_ to be.”

Okay, well, this is already going differently than she’d expected. How the hell has he figured it out already? “I’m not pretending to be anyone, Lance,” she tries.

“Really?” he scoffs, and, okay, if she dies at his hands, at least he’ll be the last face that she sees. “Then explain to me how you’re here when Pidge  _died_  a year ago.”

Oh.

“I’m not your Pidge,” she replies, more awkward than she is delicate. “I’m from an alternate reality, like with Sven, right? Please tell me that we encountered Sven in this timeline.”

Lance squints at her for a moment, as if everything that she’s saying is making sense, but he still doesn’t trust her. He takes a step closer, and then another, and Pidge forces herself to stay still. His hand ends up on her upper arm, curled around it, almost in a _protective_ gesture, which is mind-boggling enough. “What’s your favorite food?”

Pidge huffs. This is so _stupid._ She shouldn’t have to be quizzed like a frickin’ Jeopardy contestant. “Peanut butter cookies, but, _Lance,_ that’s really not a metric that you should be using to figure out if I really am a version of Pidge or not, because-”

“Okay, yeah, you’re Pidge,” Lance says immediately, offering her a crooked, half-assed smile. His hand on her arm slides over so that it’s instead warm at her back, guiding her towards him. “You look like shit.”

She laughs, then, surprised by the sudden turn of events. He's gone from trying to kill her to treating her as though she's something that could break in just a handful of seconds. “Yeah, no kidding,” she agrees, wrestling some extra dirt out of her hair. “Got a shower I can use?”

It’s a short walk to his house, but a pretty one. The flowers that he has cultivated are all in bloom, and the shine of the sun gives all of them a golden glow. He leads her away from mud that she could slip on and weeds that she could trip on, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she can _see_ those obstacles. How can she even tell him that, knowing that he's lost her?

His house is warm and wooden, comfortable in a way that the Castle never truly was. It feels like _home,_ and she hasn’t even been here for longer than a few seconds. It’s small, but lovely, even though she never truly would have associated it with someone like Lance.

“Shower’s down the hall, to the left,” he says, gesturing with his hands. “I’m gonna assume you don’t wanna change back into those, yeah? I’ll grab you something clean while you’re in and leave it by the door.”

“Thanks,” Pidge says, unsure if she should mention how drastic of a change his demeanor has taken in just the last several minutes. “Uh… don’t leave or anything, okay? I won’t be long.”

For a moment, he looks at her as if she’s crazy for even suggesting it, but then he softens at the look on her face. “I’m not going anywhere,” he promises. “I’ll just wait on the couch for you, yeah?”

“Okay,” she agrees. “See you in a bit.”

The shower is arguably the most relaxing one that she’s ever taken. She watches the dirt go down the drain, mesmerized by how clean her skin feels after. She’s grown used to feeling filthy, so removing the dirt long-since caked into her hair and skin feels like heaven. Pidge has never been so happy to use men’s 2-in-1 shampoo, but here she is.

His washer and dryer are against the wall, so she throws her dirty clothes in. Hopefully she’ll be able to change before she has to go to another reality. She towel-dries her hair in the mirror, watching it stick out in every direction. She loots the drawers for hair ties, but when she can’t find any, she just combs it out with her fingers. It’s not like Lance is going to care.

Pidge shrugs into the clothes that he’d left out for her. They’re clean and quite comfortable, even though she has to triple-tie the strings on the shorts to get them to stay in place. _I look like a dork,_ she thinks, but with affection instead of insecurity. She’s used to wearing clothes that aren’t flattering, though. Hell, she’d traversed around space in Matt’s hand-me-downs for over a year. This is luxury compared to that.

True to his word, Lance is waiting patiently on the couch when she comes back in. He’s _looking_ at her as if he can’t stop, as if one blink of his eye will make her vanish. Pidge _aches,_ seeing him and knowing that he’s still grieving for her. How horrible it must be for him, her coming here. It’s like reopening a barely-closed wound and dumping salt in it.

“Er,” she says, awkward under his gaze, “why do I feel like I’m about to give a striptease or something?”

Lance _laughs,_ and no sound of joy should ever, ever sound that wrecked. “Sorry,” he replies, finally breaking eye contact, and it’s truly pathetic how soon she misses the heat of it. “It’s just weird. You want anything? Food? Coffee?”

Pidge perks up at that last one. She knows that she probably had a cup of coffee the day before she went on this weird multiverse journey, but it feels like forever ago. “Ooh, do you have-”

“Dark roast?” Lance asks, smiling at her resulting nod. He’s already getting up from the couch, offering his seat to her. She takes it, relishing in how comfortable the cushions are. It's much better than sitting in the dirt outside. “Yeah, you got me hooked on it, so now it’s the only kind that I can ever drink. I’ll make you a cup and we can talk about what brought you here, okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees, her heart beating loud in her ears. It’s _nice,_ the feeling that he’s taking care of her. In her too-frequent daydreams about him, she’d always thought that he would be almost overbearing in his affections. It’s nice to see that it's reflected in this reality.

She watches Lance fiddle with the coffee machine, unintentionally focusing on the contrast of his hands against the metal. She flushes once she realizes what she’s doing, turning her eyes down towards the floor.  _Stop ogling him,_ she tells herself.  _He's not yours._

“How’d you know?” he asks after a few moments, causing her to look back up. “That I wasn’t your Lance, I mean?”

Pidge’s breath catches in her throat. “You, uh, look older.” Not by a lot, like the others from the last timeline, but at least a good year or two older than what her Lance back home is like. It’s still quite noticeable, though. This Lance’s hair is a little longer; his arms are a bit beefier than they used to be. His eyes are the same, though, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the Altean marks underneath them. He still looks so attractive, even though he looks tired as hell.

“You don’t,” he says, smiling to himself as though he’s saying something funny. “You look just like you did a year ago. Do you still like two sugars?”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” She wonders if all of her tastes and preferences are in line with this reality’s Pidge, or if that had just been one of the only similarities. He’s still mixing the sugar into her coffee when he brings it over to her. When she takes it, the mug is hot, but the feeling of it is reassuring rather than painful. She’s alive. This is real. “Thanks, Lance.”

“No problem, babe,” he replies automatically, sitting down next to her. He says the pet name so _easily,_ as if it’s something that he’s said a thousand times before. Nobody’s ever used one on her before, not really. “So, what brings you to my side of time and space?”

Pidge smiles, staring down into her coffee so that she doesn’t have to look at him. Everything feels so intimate and _personal_ and she’s drowning in it all. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I’m… lost, kind of? I keep showing up in all of these different realities, and I have no idea how to get home. One version of me said to look for the one constant in all of the realities, and I’m pretty sure that I know what it is, but… I figured it out last time, and I still showed up here.”

“What do you think it is?”

Pidge takes a sip out of her drink so that she doesn’t have to answer right away. “In my reality, Allura’s dead,” she explains, voice too quiet. By Lance’s sharp intake, she can at least assume that Allura must be alive in this one. “In the first reality I went to, it was Shiro, and then it was Allura again, and then it was _you._ And now, in this one, it’s me. I think that somebody always has to die. I think that’s the constant, and the universe is telling me that life moves on or whatever.” _Don’t cry, don’t cry, you’ve cried in basically every reality so far._ “Because, to be honest, we’ve all been pretty ruined over it. I haven’t heard from you in months.”

“ _What_?” Lance asks, confused as hell. “I mean - I care about Allura, don’t get me wrong, but why would I shut you out after she died?”

Pidge puts down her cup of coffee so that she can face Lance more fully. If she's about to drop a bomb on him, he deserves her full attention. “In my reality,” she says, as gentle as she can be, “you two were… together. It was sudden, I think? But you really liked her.”

He looks as though it’s the last possible thing that he could have expected to hear her say. “Me and _Allura_? But what about you?” he asks.

She smiles, confused. “What about me?”

“I mean, you and I weren’t…?”

Pidge’s eyes widen. Oh. _Oh._ The fact that he doesn’t have Altean marks but is clearly still grieving, the pet name, how _angry_ he had been on her behalf. She and Lance had been together, in this reality. “You never saw me like that,” she replies, delicate in her phrasing.

Lance catches onto the part that she doesn’t say. “But you have feelings for me,” he says, soft as ever. It’s not a question, just something that he knows to be true. “Man, sorry that your reality’s Lance is such an asshole.”

She laughs in surprise. “He’s not; don’t say that,” she scolds. “He just… doesn’t know that we’re here for him. It’s not his fault for not liking me. I just wish that he was _happy._ ”

“C’mere,” Lance says, opening his arm. She scoots closer, resting her head on his chest. His hand is warm on her back, and Pidge wishes that she could stay like this forever. “It’s okay.”

Pidge huffs, though she doesn’t feel too upset. “Stop comforting me,” she complains, tilting her head so that she can look up at him. “I should be the one comforting you.”

“Trust me,” he replies, as if she hasn’t spent the last year doing just that, “this is comforting me more than you can know.”

She hums in response, not quite sure what to say. “You look really pretty,” she blurts, even though she’s not sure if boys like him like to be called pretty. It’s not like it’s not true, and luckily, Lance doesn’t look like he minds. “You have Altean marks on your face, where I’m from.”

“Wait, what?” Lance replies, thoroughly baffled. He turns to look down at her, a disbelieving smile on his face. She loves the look of it, craving to reach up and touch the edges of his lips. “I’m Altean?”

“No, not genetically,” she explains. “Allura kissed you and you got Altean marks.” She’s never said this to her Lance, but she’s always thought that it was pretty sad. Having a permanent reminder of his first love on his face must be a pretty surefire way to elongate the moving on process.

“Allura gave me an Altean STI?”

Despite the situation, Pidge giggles. The giggles turn into full-blown laughter, her body shaking with mirth even when she tries to control it. “Oh my God,” she wheezes, “I’ve never thought about it like that before.” She can never make that joke in her own reality, not when the marks are little more than tangible sorrow, but it sure seems funny now.

Lance looks amused, too, but in a softer sort of way. “I could spend the rest of my life watching you laugh,” he says, and the worst part is that he sounds like he truly means it.

Without really thinking about the consequences of the action, she raises her hand up to brush the skin underneath his eyes, where the marks would be. “Don’t tell anyone, but I like you better without them,” she whispers.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” he tells her, and he sounds so beautifully gentle that she burns with it. His hand that’s not on her back reaches up to touch where her fingers meet his skin. “How long do you think you’ll be sticking around for?”

“Dunno,” Pidge admits. “It’s usually around a handful of hours, but now that I think about it, I always wanted to leave when I glitched out. Now…”

Now, she doesn’t want to leave. Not yet, anyway.

Lance picks up on everything that she doesn’t say. He’s always been so much more perceptive than she gives him credit for. She'll have to apologize for that, at some point, though she's sure that he already knows. “You can stay as long as you want,” he promises. “I can make up the couch for you if you wanna stay overnight. Or I can take the couch.”

Pidge should say no. She knows that her being here will only hurt him in the long run. But she’s tired, horribly so, and having a night to sleep and recharge could do wonders, especially if she doesn’t get the chance to sleep again. There’s also the fact that she’s _here,_ with Lance. Lance, who loves her.

She’s never claimed to be selfless.

 _Please, please,_ she begs internally, not sure who or what she’s talking to, but knowing that there’s something listening. _Please let me stay. Just for the night._

“That sounds great,” she says after a silence that stretches on for just a moment too long. “I’m not gonna kick you out of your bed, though. I’m fine on the couch.”

“Figures.”

 

* * *

 

Pidge stares at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

Lance had retired to his bed almost an hour ago, albeit hesitantly and a long while after he had first said that he was going to. The cabin is quiet, eerily so, with the occasional creak and moan that Pidge isn’t used to. She yearns for the days of the Castle, back when Hunk’s snoring in the other room was always enough to lure her to sleep. She’s never really needed a bed - Katie from the last reality wasn’t the only version of her that falls asleep at her workstation - but it’s the sound that she has grown to require.

There’s a reason that she always has Netflix playing in the background back home. It’s to avoid situations like this.

Maybe Lance is still awake. Did he have similar struggles, when he first moved out on his own? Or had his exhaustion made it so that he could sleep in any scenario? Lance doesn’t snore, but he does breathe quite loudly. Maybe she can sleep on his floor or something.

She’s up and out of bed before she can talk herself out of it. When she walks up the stairs, she doesn’t sneak, not wanting to startle Lance into thinking that there’s an intruder when she knocks on his door. (Not that intruders would knock, obviously, but life post-Voltron has turned every unidentified noise into a new threat.)

Pidge isn’t entirely sure what room is his, but there’s only one closed door, so she figures it out well enough. “Lance,” she whispers, quietly, in case he’s still asleep. “Are you up?”

“Yeah,” he answers a bit too quickly, voice croaky. She wonders if that’s his morning-after voice, and then immediately wishes that the thought had never occurred. “You okay, babe?”

She feels warm at the term of endearment. “Um, yeah. I just was wondering if I could, uh...“

“Don’t give yourself a stroke,” he teases, and she smiles stupidly at the door. “Door’s unlocked. Get your cute butt in here.”

Pidge opens the door slowly, as if too harsh of a moment will make him change his mind. His room is tidy, but largely unoccupied - there are no posters or keepsakes or anything of the sort. It feels lonely, even though he’s currently inside of it. He’s still lying down, curled on his side underneath the sheets, and she immediately forgets about her plan of sleeping on the floor. “Scooch,” she mumbles, lips quirking at his sleepy laugh as he does so. She crawls in next to him, haphazardly tossing his duvet over her. For a moment, they just stay there, breathing in each other’s air. “Sorry to bother you,” she says, even though it’s hard to feel bad about it when he’s looking at her like that. “Just not used to the quiet, ‘s all.”

“Me neither,” he admits. “I used to sleep, like, ten hours a night, but now I’m lucky if I get that much in a week.”

Pidge frowns. “I’m sorry,” she says, because that sounds pretty horrible. “I wish that I could help.”

“It’s okay,” Lance says, even though it obviously isn’t. He reaches out and touches her cheek, his thumb running over the skin there. “You’re here, even for a little bit. That’s all I need.”

Pidge feels like crying, but she doesn’t. He's stuck here, living in the past and seemingly unable to move on. It's just like back home, just due to a different person. She wishes that she could give him the nudge that he needs to start living in the present, but she has no idea how. “I’m here,” she agrees.

“I can’t believe that I’m not in love with you where you’re from,” he says, and she’s so unprepared for the subject change that she needs to break eye contact, instead looking down at the sheets beneath them. “How can I not be? You’re amazing.”

“If it makes you feel better,” she replies, voice tinged with humor that doesn’t feel so lighthearted, “in the last reality I went to, I was engaged to _Keith.”_

Lance gapes, and then he’s laughing, just like she had when she’d first found out. “That’s so _random_ ,"he says, an unintentional echo.

“That’s what I said,” she exclaims, immensely pleased with his reaction. “We were older, too, and I just had to thank _God_ that you weren’t around because if I saw a version of you where you’re even hotter, I would have combusted.” (She sure had taken that back once she’d learned about him being dead, but, well, she doesn’t need to make this conversation even sadder.)

He grins, something smug enough that it reminds her of the Lance that he used to be. “You think I’m hot, huh?”

Pidge groans, playfully smacking him in the chest. She leaves her hand there afterwards. “I have eyes, you dipshit,” she says, but she’s smiling, too.

“You’re so good with words,” he teases. “I’m swooning, truly. If you’re around for most of tomorrow, you can see me sweat to death while working and see how _hot_ I look, then.”

“I wish that I could stay,” Pidge admits, recklessly and honestly. By the expression that crosses Lance’s face, they both know that she’s not just talking about tomorrow. She’s not sure if she should feel as though she’s betraying her Lance by being here or not - by wanting to be here with this Lance so much. It’s not like her Lance back home actually _likes_ her the way that she likes him, though.

She barely has enough time to recognize that he’s leaning in before he kisses her. She’s never been kissed before, so she’s not sure how it usually feels, but this is more than she'd ever expected. His lips are warm and slow, as if they have all of the time in the world and then some.

She’s not really sure what she’s doing when she kisses him back, her hand on his chest moving up to grip his shoulder. He tugs her over so that she’s lying on top of him, his back against the sheets and her stomach against his. It’s possibly the most intimate first kiss of all time, but she’s comfortable like that, with her fingers gripping into his shirt. She feels safe.

He breaks the kiss after a moment, but he doesn’t go far, his lips so close to her own that she can feel his breath hot on her skin. “Then stay,” he whispers, kissing her again, this time short and sweet. “Stay. Stay. Stay.” Every time he says it, he presses another kiss against her face - moving from her lips to her nose to her cheeks.

Pidge does cry, then, blinking the tears away in frustration. He wipes away the ones that make it down her face with his thumbs. “I don’t think that I can,” she says, honest. “Whatever brought me into this wants me to figure something out, and I don’t think that it would allow me to.”

Lance looks as though he already knew that was the answer, but he still seems rightfully upset. Pidge presses one tentative kiss to the side of his face before snuggling down so that her ear presses against his chest. “You could either help me out here or we could go back to the Garrison,” he says, and he sounds so damn wistful that she can’t bring herself to tell him not to dwell on it. “We can get a dog or two, and you can come to all of the Saturday family dinners.”

“Sounds romantic,” Pidge agrees, and she means to be teasing, but she just sounds sad. “We can work for a while and then spend a year traveling the world. Maybe adopt a few kids once we’ve figured out how to be Earthlings again."

Lance brushes his fingers through her hair in slow, gentle strokes. “That’s all that I’ve ever wanted,” he says, quiet. “A family, an adventure. I’d do anything to have that with you.”

She sniffs and buries her face into his shirt, not wanting him to see her crying face. If she could, she would make it so that he never had to move on from her. She would fix it. She _yearns_ to fix everything, and not just for him. She wants to help put together the pieces in the family that has learned to live without her. She wants to complete the team that has been broken for a year now. She wants to make it all _better._

But she _can’t._

“Oh, babe,” he murmurs. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

She sits up, her butt on the mattress next to him but her legs pressed against him. Blindly, she reaches behind him for a pillow, and then hits him in the chest with it. Not harshly enough to hurt, of course, or to really have any sort of impact at all - but the thought is there. “Don’t comfort me,” she tells him, not sounding as threatening as she wants to. “Not when I’m hurting you just by being here, and hurting you even more by leaving! I can’t even _do_ anything to fix it because I’m just some pawn in this fucked up game.”

Lance sits up, too, shifting so that he can wrap his arms around her and hold her close. “I’ll be fine,” he tells her. “It’ll suck, don’t get me wrong. But I’ll be okay. I’m _Lance,_ c’mon, I’m awesome. I got this.”

Pidge huffs at the attempt to make her laugh. “You’re lucky you’re cute,” she says, and even though the words come out pained, he laughs as if it had been a flawless delivery.

“I’m lucky,” he agrees, even though he’s anything but. He tugs her back down so that they’re spooning, his arms keeping her close. She wonders if they’ve done this before. “Even though you just tried to initiate a pillow fight with me.”

She falls asleep like that, eventually, with his body close to hers. It’s the best sleep that she’s had in a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

Pidge wakes up alone.

Panic grips her for a short, agonizing moment. She’s simply not ready to move onto the next one, especially since she’s still in Lance’s clothes.

She pushes herself into a sitting position, glancing around wearily, but she relaxes immediately upon the realization that she’s still in his bedroom. In fact, she can even hear him downstairs - pans clattering, him talking. The words are indistinct, but the lack of another voice makes her think that he’s on the phone.

Ooh, if he’s making breakfast, she totally wants in. She’s never tasted his cooking before, but he must have gotten pretty good at it by now. Pidge pushes herself to her feet, the wooden floor cold beneath her toes. A thought half-develops in her mind about forcing Lance to decorate his room more, but she squashes it once she realizes how impossible it is. Especially since she’s on borrowed time already.

Sure enough, Lance is on the phone, the device squished between his ear and shoulder as he washes dishes in the sink. “I’m glad to hear you’re doing okay, man. I’ll come visit when I can, yeah?” There are two plates of pancakes that look _delicious_ on the counter, but Pidge bypasses them for now (a terribly difficult decision) in favor of pressing herself against his back and wrapping her arms tight around his waist.

He jolts at the contact, but immediately relaxes, drying his hands so that he can touch where her hands intertwine with his own. “Hey, look, can I call you back later? I kind of, uh, have someone over. Ha, ha, very funny. See you soon, man. Bye.” He hangs up and puts his phone down, twisting around in Pidge’s hold so that he’s facing her.

“Good morning,” she says, quieter than necessary. “Who was that? Secret admirer?”

Lance huffs a laugh, reaching out to tuck some of her hair behind her ear. “Matt, actually. We call each other on Saturdays to make sure that the other, uh…”

_Made it through the week._

“Oh,” Pidge whispers, feeling as though her heart is physically breaking apart. “Did you tell him?”

“Nah,” he replies. “I figured that I would once you leave. It’s long enough of a drive that I wouldn’t want him getting his hopes up and then end up not seeing you.”

“That’s true,” she agrees, even though it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth. The fact that Matt and Lance, her two favorite boys, are so _broken,_  and she can’t do anything about it… it stings. She has half a mind to call up Hunk and demand that he stage an intervention, but she knows that it would do more harm than good.

“Hey,” he chides, gentle. “Quit thinking so loud.”

Pidge is beginning to realize that she is a selfish, selfish girl.

She brings her hands up to either side of his face, fingers drawing absent-minded designs into his skin. Lance quirks an eyebrow at her, confused, but he’s not in suspense for long. She surges up onto her tip toes and kisses him, even though she’s still not entirely sure what she’s doing. He hums, surprised, but reciprocates quickly, moving his hands down so that they’re firm on her hips.

When she kisses Lance, she’s back in space, pretending to still be asleep as he carries her to bed. She’s winning a battle, finding Matt, rolling her eyes as Keith and Lance push each other around. She’s back in her parent’s house, before any of this happened, with Mom’s cooking and Dad’s jokes and Bae Bae sleeping at the foot of her bed. It’s nice and familiar and _everything,_ all at once.

When she kisses Lance, she’s home.

She’s not sure how long they stay like that, but it doesn’t feel like nearly enough. They break apart for just a moment, and he looks as though he’s about to kiss her again when her stomach growls, loud and insistent.

Pidge turns bright red, immediately withdrawing her hands so that she can use them to hide her face instead. Lance just laughs, pulling her hands away so that he can keep looking at her. “C’mon, my cooking is good, I swear,” he says, nodding towards the nearby plates. “Not Hunk-good, but good nonetheless.”

“I bet,” she agrees, still sheepish, letting him lead her over. He pulls her chair out with a flourish, ignoring her eye roll in favor of bowing dramatically. “Oh my _God_ , you’re such a dork.”

“I get it from you,” Lance accuses, sliding into his own seat. “Now stop slandering me and eat your food.”

(The pancakes are pretty stellar.)

 

* * *

 

Pidge’s clothes are still warm from the dryer when she changes back into them. When she looks into the mirror, she looks _normal,_ the way that she had before any of this. Is her body even really here? Or is it still in her bed back home? Is this all some sort of simulation that feels real, but isn’t?

The tingles start in her fingers, slowly enough that at first she thinks that they have merely fallen asleep. But shaking them only increases the feeling, it going down to her palm and then creeping up her forearm. It’s not as instantaneous as it had been the last few times. She wonders if it’s because this time, she truly wants to stay.

She knows that she can’t. She can’t trade her old reality for a new one. What would even happen? Would her old timeline just stay frozen in time forever, or would it go on without her? Neither are particularly pleasant.

She can’t replace a dead girl, even if the dead girl is her.

“Lance,” she calls through the hall, using her working hand to open the bathroom door. He must hear the unease in her voice, because he’s in the hallway in a second, staring straight at her hand. She looks down to see that even though she’s not moving it, it’s twisting and turning as if she is. At one point, it’s even _gone_ for just a heartbeat, but then it’s back.

“Oh, shit,” Lance says, and she doesn’t realize that she’s falling until he catches her. She can’t even feel him holding her, even though she can see that he is. His mouth is moving but she can’t hear anything, can’t feel anything, and she knows that it won’t be long until she can’t _see_ anything, either, because she’s going, going, gone-


	5. i like our friendship more

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The music's really fucking good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's more lighthearted than the last one, promise

Pidge can hear muted chatter through the walls of the building, barely audible over the wickedly loud sound of some rock music that she’s never heard before. She balances her hand against the brick wall, nearly falling over in the process. Her knees feel weak, and her sides still burn with a touch that is no longer there.

Weariness tugs at her veins, her eyes scrunching shut as she tries to calm her breathing. She can’t pass out or anything now, not when she just wants this all to be _over._ She’d gotten too attached, too sidetracked - the look on Lance’s face when she’d glitched still makes her nauseous  - now, she just needs to get back home.

Her reality isn’t perfect, she knows that, but it’s hers, and it’s somewhere she can stay for more than a day without being whisked off somewhere else. She’d been starting to take that for granted, but now, when she gets back, she’s going to do _nothing_ for a week, just because she can.

 _Focus,_ she reminds herself. _You’re outside. You always end up near the people that you need to meet, so they’re probably inside, right? So go inside._

Pidge waits a minute, mainly so that she’ll stop feeling like she has to throw up, and then turns towards the front of the building. There’s a neon sign out front that says _The Wreckoning,_ in an ugly, ostentatious font, paired with an image of a wine glass. She pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration. Why, oh _why,_ would the meddling gods above bring her to a _club_?

It’s not like she’s brought her ID through time and space. Can she even get inside? It doesn’t look like there’s a bouncer outside, or much of anyone, actually, so maybe she’s lucky. It’s weird, the contrast between the pulsing music indoors to the dead quiet outdoors. Is it just that time of night, where everyone is either clubbing or sleeping with no in between?

It’s weird that it _is_ night, actually, considering the fact that it had been late morning when she’d left the last reality, but she supposes time moves differently. There’s the horrifying concept of it having been _years_ back home, with only a few days passing by her standards, but she squashes it as much as she can. There’s nothing that she can do about it, if it _is_ the case, so she might as well just pray that it isn’t.

Upon turning the corner, she sees that there _is_ a bouncer, just having been masked by the walls near the doorway. He looks up at her and smiles. “Hey! I didn’t even see you come back out. You look different! What’s with the change of clothes?” He opens the door behind him, gesturing for her to come inside.

Pidge blinks at the implication that he’s seen her come in prior to this. “Uh, spilled something on my other shirt,” she lies, half-relieved that she hadn’t been asked for an ID and half-confused as to why. “Thanks, man.”

“No problem, dude! Enjoy!”

When she walks in, she quickly notices that it’s not as crowded as she had been expecting. The stools by the bar are all taken, sure, but most of the crowd is gathered by the stage, talking instead of dancing. The music playing over the speakers is drowning out anything else, but the loud volume's not too horrible. Pidge has been shot at in close range before, okay, she can handle the bass in a song.

The music cuts off so abruptly that she’s left wondering what the difference in the atmosphere is for just a moment, before she realizes that she can actually _hear._ The DJ announces something that makes the crowd cheer, but Pidge’s ears are still pulsing and the words are inaudible. She pushes closer to the stage, curious, _somehow_ feeling that she’s going to want to watch this, too.

Someone bumps into her, hard, causing her to nearly fall flat on her ass. “Oh, shit, I’m so sorry!” the perpetrator says. “Do you need any - oh. Woah.”

Pidge looks at the other person, confused, and immediately recoils. It’s _her,_ in a way, though it takes a minute to realize that. Her hair is dyed dark, her face covered in piercings, makeup done so perfectly that Pidge would never even be able to _comprehend_ attempting it, tattoos peeking out underneath her cuffed sleeves -

“You look like me,” the other girl says, squinting. “Like, a vanilla version of me, but still _me._ Am I high? I didn’t even smoke that much today. Ugh, if James gave me the wrong stuff on ‘accident’ again, I’m gonna kill him. What’s your name?”

 _Holy shit,_ Pidge thinks, nearly giddy with surprise. _The other version of me is a really sexy stoner._

“I’m Pidge,” she introduces, and considering the lack of aliens around, decides not to explain the multiverse. “I guess we do kinda look similar, huh? What’s yours?”

“I’m K,” the other version of her says. She still doesn’t really seem to believe that she’s sober, if the way that she’s squinting is any indication. “Nice to meet you, Pidge.”

“You too,” Pidge responds, only a touch awkward as she scrambles for an excuse to stick with K. “Hey, um, I’m new around here, any chance I could hang around you for the night?”

“Sure, girl with bird name that looks like me,” K says. She fiddles with her septum piercing, flipping it back and forth, and the whole situation is so surprising that Pidge follows the movement with her eyes. “You know, I wonder if we’re somehow related or something. Long-lost cousins and all that jazz. What’s your last name?”

“Gunderson,” Pidge lies, not wanting to pretend that they _are_ somehow long lost siblings. Scrambling for a new conversation topic, she asks, “hey, who’s playing, anyway? It’s weird that they turned the music off for so long, right?”

K looks at her as if she has two heads, but then shrugs as if it doesn’t matter that much. “Maybe, but who cares? You really don’t know who’s playing?”

“Um, no,” Pidge says. “Should I? Is it like, Fall Out Boy or something?”

K laughs so hard that she ends up gripping Pidge’s shoulder for support. “Oh man, you’re hilarious,” she says, as if Pidge is being oblivious on purpose. “You know what, Pidge, I’m gonna buy you a drink just for that. What do you want?”

“Um,” she replies, scrambling her mind for what would be on the menu at a place like this. “Water?”

K rolls her eyes, as if she’s disappointed but not surprised. “I’ll just get you my favorite. Same face, same taste buds, right?”

“...Right?” Pidge guesses. It had worked for her so far. Ugh, she hopes she doesn’t accidentally get shitfaced or anything (she’s so much of a lightweight that it’s embarrassing) because then she would _definitely_ pee her pants while glitching through time and space.

“Hold down the fort,” K commands, giving her a mock salute. “Don’t let anyone steal our good view.”

“I won’t,” Pidge promises, even though she feels so out of place and awkward right now that she would probably let anyone walk right over her. Her eyes drift to the stage, where a few instruments are being set up. A keyboard, an electric guitar, a drum set. She didn’t really know that clubs had live music, though a quick glance to her left proves that they have a DJ booth, too.

She’s pretty sure that she’ll never be the clubbing type, even when she _is_ of age, which is why it’s so weird to see another version of herself here. Pidge has always liked the punk aesthetic, in a distant kind of way, but she’s never even dreamed about applying that to herself. She’s considered a tattoo now and then, something small and meaningful, but the whole sleeve of them that K had been sporting? Whew.

“Here,” K says, and Pidge jolts at the unexpected sound. She hands her a red Solo cup, which is such a cliché that Pidge kind of wants to die, but oh well. “Vodka cranberry, at your service. They can make them kind of strong here, so I asked them to not go so heavy.”

“Thanks,” Pidge says, taking the cup and staring into its contents. “I appreciate it.”

“I’d say next round’s on you, but you don’t look like you have a wallet stuffed into any of those pockets, so you’re fine,” K says, shrugging. She stands on her tiptoes, trying to see the stage better. “Why’d you even come here, if not to drink or see the show?”

She has no idea how to answer that. “I was supposed to be meeting a friend,” she lies. “They cancelled once I was already here, so I figured I’d at least stick around for a bit. What about you? Why are you here alone?”

“No one wanted to come because they don’t like the type of music that I do,” K admits with a shrug. “My brother was gonna come with me, but he got called into work. I figured I wasn’t gonna let my loser friends stop me from doing what I like, you know?”

Pidge smiles, endeared, and takes a sip of her drink. At first, she can barely taste the vodka at all, but it’s intense in the aftertaste. It’s kind of gross, but nothing that she would grimace over. “Good for you,” she says. “Thanks for letting me bother you, by the way.”

“Oh, please,” K says, smiling into her own cup. “I’m honored to convert you into a GW fan.”

“GW?” Gaming wizard? Gunshot wound?

“Galaxy Wolves,” she elaborates. “That’s the band that’s playing tonight. They’re pretty popular because they’re local. I actually went to school with most of them.”

“Interesting,” Pidge says, slowly connecting the dots about who these band members just might be. “Do you think that-“

The lights go out all at once, leaving the glow bracelets that almost everyone is wearing the only light sources in the room. For a moment, everyone goes quiet, anticipation grabbing the crowd like hands on a wrist. There’s quiet shuffling, footsteps on carpet, and then -

There’s a light, center stage, and Pidge’s jaw drops at who she sees.

“Hey everybody,” Lance greets, as if he’s talking to a group of friends and not a crowd at his feet. She can barely hear the words come out of his mouth, too focused on the fact that his hair is dyed blue and, _oh my God,_ are those snake bites? Pidge is going to explode. “How’s everyone’s night going?”

Everyone shouts in response, including K, who is so close to Pidge’s ear that she winces. Pidge looks behind Lance to see Hunk behind the drums, Keith behind the keyboard, _Shiro,_ of all people, gripping that electric guitar as if it’s a bayard.

“They’re amazing,” K breathes, barely audible underneath the sound of Lance talking aimlessly about how much he loves performing here. She’s watching the members on the stage with clear excitement. She looks so _alive,_ so joyful - like a teenage girl with her first crush, and it’s something that Pidge has never had. Sure, she’s fallen for people ( _just one_ ) so hard that her knees bruised, but it has never been carefree. Not like this.

“Yeah,” Pidge agrees, soft, following which one K’s eyes are tracked on. It’s unsurprising, at this point, when it leads to Lance. “Don’t you think it’s kinda stereotypical, having a crush on the lead singer?"

K jolts, surprised, but it quickly morphs into mocking irritation as she flicks Pidge on the nose. “Shut up,” she groans. “Believe it or not, most of the people want to take Shiro - the guitarist - to pound town, so it’s not as stereotypical as you might think.”

“I’m just teasing,” Pidge says in response. “You should go for it, if he’s single.”

“Me?"K splutters. “Dude, I’m hot, like, _would bone myself_ hot, but he’s the lead singer in a _band._ That’s out of everyone’s league, if they’re not also a celebrity.”

Pidge takes another drink so that she’ll suppress a giggle. K fangirls over this punk boy band the way that _she_ fangirls over going to new planets. “ _Celebrity_? K, if he’s performing at a club like this, he’s D list, _maybe._ You could totally go for it.”

“...Maybe,” K agrees, quieter than Pidge had been expecting. “Do you really think I have a shot?”

“You’ll never know unless you try.”

Their conversation tapers off the second that the band starts to play, because, well-

The music’s really fucking good.

 

* * *

 

“You’re drunk,” Pidge says, squinting at K with distrust. “I do not want someone _drunk_ doing anything to my body, no thank you.”

“I’m not drunk,” K announces, just loud enough to be highly unconvincing. Especially when she punctuates the statement by stumbling so hard that Pidge needs to grab onto her. “Plus, it wouldn’t be me! It would be my friend, Allura, who has just the _nicest_ hands. She has a bunch of her own and they all look _so_ sexy. She’d treat you real good!”

Pidge feels a bit numb, too, but she’d stopped after that first drink, so she should be in the clear. K had gone on to seconds and thirds. “Where even is she, anyway,” she asks, feeling too cloudy for Allura’s name drop to be too much of a surprise. She does wonder if Allura is a human or an Altean, though.

“She’s my roommate! You could come over,” K proposes, as if inviting strangers to your apartment so you can give them stick-n-pokes is a completely natural thing to do. “I think the band’s coming over, too, because Shiro and Allura like to paint each other’s nails after. C’mon, I can call an Uber.”

“Wait, _what?”_ Pidge asks. “You’re friends with them? I thought it was all _Lance is so out of my league_ , but dude, you’ve _totally_ got a shot if you’re all _friends._ "

K narrows her eyes, pulling out her phone and navigating to the Uber app. It says her name in the corner, _Katerina Holt._ Her rider rating is a 3.1, which is both hilarious and nerve wracking at the same time. “I don't know. I like him, but I like our friendship more, y'know what I mean? Oh, and when did I even tell you his name?”

“He announced it on stage,” Pidge lies, because there’s a good chance that he actually _had_ when she hadn’t been paying attention. That’s what musicians do, right? “Is it just going to be the band and Allura at your house?”

“Apartment,” K corrects. “And yeah, probably. Don’t worry about it, though. If you want to crash on my couch or something, I’ll keep it off-limits for you.”

That’s … sweet, though Pidge is still highly questioning K’s logic about letting a complete stranger into her apartment in the middle of the night. _Ugh,_ she thinks. _Am I really going to get a tattoo just so I can get more info on these people?_

She internally groans. Hopefully there’s still a way that she can get out of it, once she’s there.  “I need another drink before I even _consider_ your friend putting a needle _anywhere_ near me.”

K laughs so hard that she nearly falls over.

 

* * *

 

Pidge likes being drunk on Earth alcohol more than space alcohol.

Space alcohol is borderline hallucinogenic. When she’d gotten drunk on it that one time with Shiro and Lance, her surroundings had shifted so that Pidge hadn’t been sure where she was, and she’d ended up eating space goo in one of the showers.

This is nicer than that. She just feels _looser,_ like that stage of being tired where everything’s funny. She stumbles through her greetings with the band - Hunk gives her a bear hug upon arrival - and she laughs at herself when she falls over. The others seem to think that her laughing is funny, too, so it’s just this whole cycle of laughing that’s nice and warm and right.

They’re all kind to her, and Pidge feels bad for ever thinking that they wouldn’t be. She’d seen the dyed hair and the tattoos and made her own judgmental opinions, but they’re actually even nicer than _her_ reality’s version of them. Keith tells her that her hair looks really soft and pretty, and Shiro lets her wear his sweatshirt when she starts to get cold. K makes her two more drinks but then cuts her off, and it’s sweet, being cared about like that. Everyone always says that there’s no one nicer than drunk girls at parties, right?

 _Holy shit,_ Pidge thinks, half-delirious, _I’m hanging out with my team members who are also punk band members and it’s actually the most fun that I think I’ve ever had._

Lance, per usual, is devastatingly pretty. She doesn’t talk to him too much, mainly because she looks at him and still hears _stay, stay, stay,_ but he gives her a dorky grin when they make accidental eye contact. He's the one who looks the most out of place with this new style, in her opinion. Sure, it's weird seeing Hunk in a studded jacket, but seeing Lance with more face piercings than Pidge has  _friends_? It's weird. 

It's weird how she still finds him so cute, too, so she doesn't look at him much. She doesn't want any of them to think that she's coming after K's man, after all.

Allura is human, in the end, though she’s still earth-shatteringly gorgeous in that slightly inhuman way. Pidge tells her so with a ramble that stops and restarts multiple times, but Allura just smiles throughout it all, friendly and patient. The others all seem to find it thoroughly endearing, with K and Lance stopping their own personal conversation a few times to laugh at the situation.

“Were you serious about wanting a tattoo?” Allura asks, some time after Pidge stops commenting on how perfect her eyebrows are. “I know K said you should get one, but you don’t have to do anything just because she said so.”

Pidge hums, debating. She kind of feels as though she’s going to sink into the couch. “Um… she said you had a bunch! Did you do them yourself?”

Allura rolls up her sleeve, pointing out the tattoos that had been done by her and the ones that had been done by someone else. The ones done by her are cute, and not faded the way that Pidge knows stick-n-pokes can be. The lines are clean and dark, and even though some of them are a bit nonlinear, it seems to add to the appeal instead of making them seem poorly done.

“Woah,” she says, and she doesn’t even realize that she’d been tracing them with her fingers until she snaps it back in embarrassment. “Sorry! Sorry. Um, how often do you have to darken those up?”

Allura makes a noise of consideration. “Sometimes, it’s a few days after. Sometimes, it’s not until a long time after and it’s starting to fade.”

“Oh, okay,” Pidge replies. “I dunno - I’m traveling a lot right now and don’t think I’d really be able to give it the aftercare that it deserves.” _Traveling a lot_ \- ha, understatement of the frickin’ year.

“Where are you headed?”

Pidge opens her mouth and closes it. “Home,” she says, soft. “I’m going on a trip for a bit just to, uh… clear my head.” This “trip” is doing the exact opposite of clearing her head, but whatever. It’s not like they need to know that.

“Well, I hope you find the answers that you’re looking for,” Allura tells her, and Pidge is grinning. “So, tattoo: yes, no?”

“No, I think I’m okay,” she declines. “Yours are super duper pretty, though. If I did get a tattoo, I think I’d get a little planet with stars or something, but nah, I’m gonna wait on it for a few more months. Thanks, though.”

“That’s completely fine,” Allura says, smiling as though she’s thoroughly endeared. “That tattoo idea sounds so cute. Are you interested in space?”

“Yeah,” she confirms. “I was actually in a pilot training program, but, uh… some shit went down and I had to leave. I still love it, though.” There’s no tactful way to explain that she accidentally ran off to space with, well, _them._

Shiro tilts his head in consideration, and there are realizations dawning on his face that Pidge doesn’t quite understand. “I used to teach at one of those, actually. Where’d you study?”

“The Garrison,” she replies, slow, and at his raised eyebrow, says with faux casualness, “what, did you work there or something?”

“For a few years,” Shiro says, sounding rather embarrassed. “I got let go, though.”

“I got accepted there,” Lance brags, and, God, how had Pidge almost _forgotten_ that we was here? He’s been to busy talking to K in the corner, and ugh, Pidge can’t even look at him. If she does, she thinks she’ll shatter into a million pieces. “Didn’t go, though. I figured I’d give music a shot, first. Why’d they let you go, man?”

Keith snickers. “He couldn’t stop fighting with his ex over everything.”

Shiro hits him with a pillow, and Pidge smiles, fond. She wonders who the ex is - Adam? Curtis? Someone entirely different? It seems unlike him to fight with somebody so much that he gets fired, but, well, it also seems unlike him to have a sleeve of Pokémon tattoos.

“Ooh, Pidge!” Allura says. “I would just _love_ to paint your nails. I think that purple would look so good with your outfit. Would you let me?”

Pidge blinks, surprised at the change of direction, but nods. “Yeah, that would be great!” It’ll be interesting to see if the nail polish persists once she gets back to her own reality, at the very least. “I’d offer to do yours in return, but I’m pretty bad at doing nails.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” Allura chirps, pushing herself to her feet. “I’ll grab my nail polish!”

“You’ve made her week just by agreeing to let her do yours,” Keith tells her, once Allura has already disappeared down through the hall. “She’s obsessed with stuff like this.”

“I’m glad to be of service,” she replies, overly soft to the point where the joke crumbles. To recover, she asks, “do you get yours done?”

“For shows,” he says, showing off his black nails. “I don’t usually do them normally, but that’s just mainly because I don’t like how ugly they look when they start to chip.”

“Oh, I getcha,” Pidge says. She’d gotten into a bad habit of scratching away at her chipped nails, back when she still used to paint them. “My brother used to do mine, because I thought I _had_ to learn, so he decided we should do it together. Once he wasn’t there to do it, it got less fun and I stopped caring.”

Keith tilts his head in consideration, as if he’s aware that she’d just overshared but doesn’t really care about it either way. “Cool. Shiro used to do mine. When we were kids, I tried to paint his eyeball.”

Shiro flips him off.

 

* * *

 

“Where’s your bathroom?” Pidge asks, once her nails have finally dried off. Everyone but her and Allura have vanished from the living room at some point, probably retiring for the night, so she supposes that she should probably be… figuring out whatever it is that she needs to figure out, and soon. These people are nice, but they sure wouldn’t appreciate her hanging around in the morning after social norms allow.

“Second on the left down the hall,” Allura instructs, pointing needlessly in the general direction.

“Thanks,” Pidge responds, standing up and brushing off her jeans. She’d gotten Dorito dust on them a while ago, back when Hunk had been telling that story about when he’d fallen out of a treehouse and broken his wrist. She’s halfway through a quiet remark about where the hell Hunk went, anyway, when she turns the corner and all of her speech dies in her throat.

K is pressed against the wall of the hallway, one leg holding her up and the other wrapped around Lance’s waist. He’s holding that leg close to him, keeping it safe, while his other hand is balanced on the wall behind her. They’re kissing, or at least trying to, because they keep breaking apart just to grin dorkily at each other. They look so in _love_ that it’s stupid, as if they wouldn’t even notice if the world came crashing down around them. Pidge doesn’t exactly know _why,_ but she feels her stomach twist and turn as though it’s being tugged on by some tangible force.

 _Good for them,_ she thinks, and she _means_ it. If only her heart could get the memo, and maybe this could stop feeling like such a punch in the face. It’s not jealousy, not really, but it’s _envy_ in some wicked form. It’s them having what she can never receive.

She turns around abruptly before they can spot her, walking back into the living room. Somefuckinghow, Allura has fallen asleep in the ten seconds that Pidge has had her back turned, crashed against the couch with a nail polish bottle held tightly in her grip.

Despite the fact that she feels like she’s drowning, Pidge smiles. She grabs a blanket off of the nearby recliner and drapes it over Allura, gently so that she doesn’t wake her. She doesn’t stir, and Pidge doesn’t linger. She just sighs and leaves the room, trying to remember where the damn front door is.

It turns out to be through the kitchenette, and she’s almost out the door when she realizes that she’s still wearing Shiro’s sweatshirt. She grabs the hem of it and yanks it up -

“No, keep it,” a voice says, and she turns to see Shiro himself, smiling warmly at her from the other end of the kitchenette. “It’s cold outside.”

“I won’t be able to bring it back,” she replies, though she does hesitate in taking it off.

“I’m sure,” he says, and he still has that smile on his face, so Pidge drops her hands from the fabric. She opens her mouth to say thanks, but before she can, he’s already talking again. “You know, I was at the Garrison for eight years. Four as a student, another four as a teacher.”

Pidge swallows. She thinks that she knows where this is going. “Okay.”

“I think that I would have remembered you. The classes aren’t small, but they aren’t big, either. I would have at least recognized you.”

She’s not really sure what to say to that. It’s not like she’d been lying, when she’d said that she trained at the Garrison, it’s just that it’s not Shiro’s truth. “I’m not a liar,” she says after a heartbeat.

“Didn’t say you were,” Shiro says, and he looks awfully smug, as if she’s a puzzle that he’s just put together. “Don’t think you are, either. Have you ever heard of the parallel universe theory?”

There is no fucking way.

“Yeah,” she says, and she has a ramble in her throat but it gets stuck somewhere before her mouth. What else can she even say?

“I figured,” he replies, “because they teach it second year, right? Who did you have for a teacher in that class?”

Pidge struggles to recall it for a moment. It feels so, so long ago, like another lifetime. “Commander Kerins,” she says, eyebrows slightly furrowed as she recalls it. “She had a broken nose, so all of her sneezes sounded weird.”

“Commander Kerins,” Shiro repeats, and for a moment, Pidge wonders if that teacher even exists in this reality, but then he’s smiling in a way that’s sharper than fondness but warmer than spite. “Yeah, she was one of the ones who kicked me out. She was against me from the beginning, though. Wasn’t a fan of a gay man with tattoos.”

She swallows, blinking back anxiety as she regards him. He doesn’t look angry, or freaked out, or much of anything, really. “Why’d you bring it up?” she asks. “The multiverse theory, I mean.”

He steps out from his side of the room, until they’re actually at a reasonable distance for a conversation. Even so, it feels like an invasion of personal space, but maybe that’s just because of the circumstances. “When I was there,” he says, “things happened. Things that I couldn’t explain and that nobody else would explain to me. You’re dealing with some of that right now, aren’t you?”

Pidge opens her mouth to say _anything,_ but before she can even think of what would make sense, he continues. “You look at Allura as if she’s about to disappear. You look at Lance as if the mere action is killing you. You talk to _all_ of us as if you've known us for your entire life. Do you?”

She takes a deep breath, as if trying to figure out how to respond. She wonders what he’s seen, for him to _know_ this so confidently. “If I say anything, you’ll just think that I’m drunk.” The mere sentence is an admission of what he’s trying to get out of her: she’s not from this place, and they both know it.

“Tipsy, maybe,” Shiro agrees, and he’s not wrong. She has long since stopped stumbling, but she still feels hot from the booze. “But just because you’re tipsy doesn’t mean that you’re not telling the truth.”

Pidge touches the skin of her face, just above her cheek. “Where I come from,” she tells him, “you have a scar from here to here.” She draws the finger across her nose until it ends up on the other side of her face. Then, she moves her finger to her jaw, tracing it vertically up her cheek. “And this one’s Keith’s. Matt has one on the other side, and smaller.”

“Matt,” Shiro repeats, as if he’s confirming to himself that Pidge does actually know him. She wonders what Matt is like in this reality - is he an emo, too? That would be pretty funny. “K’s brother.”

“No,” Pidge says, barely audible to even her own ears. Weirdly, this feels like confessing to a crime. “Mine.”

Shiro’s smile comes back, but it’s a fickle thing. It must be weird, having some teenage girl who looks a heckuva lot like someone else confirm one of the most complex theories of space and time. Despite all this, his words are gentle when he says, “you’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. She’s forgotten a bunch of aspects of her old reality, like what her phone background is and what her door code is for the lab, and she can’t wait to relearn those things once she gets back.

Somehow, she feels as though she has learned everything that there is to know from this reality. She had felt the same way the moment that Lance had said _you and I weren’t…?_ No one has died in this reality, though, as far as she knows, which crushes that theory to smithereens. “I should probably get going about now.”

“Back home?”

“Not sure,” Pidge admits. She sure fucking hopes so, but she knows on some deep level that she’s not headed home yet. “I never know until I get there.”

“I hope you get there soon,” Shiro says, and he really does sound like he means it. She swallows down the _me, too_ , and opens the front door, staring into the hallway in front of her. Her fingers feel tingly.

His “bye, Katie,” is quiet when she closes the door behind her, but she hears it all the same.


	6. babe, your evil clone is weird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dots connect.

Pidge’s wrists ache.

She tugs at them fruitlessly, not fully comprehending the fact that there’s something keeping them in place until she opens her eyes.

She can’t see her wrist restraints over the sleeves of Shiro’s oversized sweater, but she can definitely feel them. Whatever’s restraining her is cool against her skin and bumps up obviously underneath the fabric. It must be metal, but it’s larger than just a simple pair of handcuffs - there had been some times in space where she’d been able to break out of her restraints (the consequence being a broken bone or two) but it feels highly improbable now.

Huh, this sucks.

(She remembers having her wrists bound and Zethrid and Ezor grinning at her with no amusement, _don’t you touch her_ and realizing that the reason her heart was pounding wasn’t just because of the fear-)

The room around her is unoccupied and small, barely able to fit the table. It looks like a classic interrogation room from any cop show, and it takes Pidge longer than she’ll later admit to realize that that’s probably because it _is_ an interrogation room. There’s a mirror in front of her, too, and she’d bet anything that there are people staring at her through it.

“Hello?” she calls out, and when she looks at the mirror, she wonders if she’s staring at any of them. “Anyone there that wants to tell me why I’m tied up?”

Which, okay, is probably not the best way to talk to potential interrogators, but considering the fact that the glitching has started to respond to her panic, she’s confident in the fact that whatever is causing it wouldn’t let her get _murdered._

 _Man, is this reality’s Pidge a criminal or something? It’d_ suck _if I got caught in her place._ She wonders what she would even do that would require an interrogation. Hacking? Robberies? Nah, if anyone out of the five of them was going to be arrested for going on a crime spree, it would probably be Lance. (Not that any of the others wouldn’t commit crimes, it’s just that Lance is probably the only one who will get caught.)

A door from next to the mirror opens, and Admiral freakin’ Sanda comes through, looking as worn down as ever. Man, if she’s not dead, Pidge can only _wonder_ how this timeline differs from hers. At least she knows, more or less, that she’s in the Galaxy Garrison. She’s never been inside any of their interrogation rooms before, so that’s kind of cool.

“Admiral Sanda,” she greets, not bothering to keep quiet when she knows she’s not getting a lawyer, anyway. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” She would have _cowered_ at the mere thought of talking to an _admiral_ like this, once a time, but what can she say? She doesn’t particularly like having her hands tied, and it’s not like any of this matters, anyway. If everything always gets wiped out in a few hours, all of her new friendships and realizations gone with a blink, why does she even bother?

Pidge doesn’t give up often, but she’s so _tired._ Last time, she’s not even sure that she learned anything, and she’d been ripped out anyway. Maybe she’s doomed to traverse through every reality that there is for the rest of time, never aging, never _changing -_ just growing more and more tired until all she can do is sit there until she’s whisked away again.

The mere thought is horrifying, though. Can she really give up on her own reality back home? Can she really give up on all of the efforts that she’s gone through to pick all of the pieces back up? They _need_ her, back home. They need her to teach the next generation and work on new projects and they need her to _help_ in the restoration efforts. She can’t lose hope, not when so many people would be affected by her never coming back.

Admiral Sanda leans over the table, her palms so close to Pidge’s wrists that she wonders if she’s planning on breaking them. “Let’s start simple,” Sanda says, voice firm and emotionless. “What is your name?”

“Uh,” Pidge says, having expected more of an answer to her previous question. She’s not sure why she had been; she _knows_ how emotionally dull Sanda is. “Katie Holt.”

She grinds her teeth so hard that Pidge can _hear_ it, like nails on a chalkboard. “ _Wh_ _at_ is your _name_?”

Pidge frowns at that, confused. What, do nicknames not count or something? “Katerina Holt,” she tries again, this time emphasizing the words as if she’s talking to a kindergartner.

“Why are you _lying_?” Sanda demands.

“Okay, I’m officially really confused,” Pidge offers, unable to lie her way out of this when she doesn’t know what lies would even work, not when all she knows about this reality is that Admiral Sanda is alive. “Katerina Holt is my birth name. I go by Katie or Pidge. Can you explain why I’m tied up now?”

“You are ‘tied up’,” Sanda says, the words mocking as if that is not precisely the situation that Pidge is in right now, “because you were found trespassing on highly secure military grounds. There is _also_ the fact that you are not who you say you are.”

“Okay,” Pidge offers. She can understand that first bit, though she completely loses track of the point during the last half. “Um, who am I then, if not myself?”

“Not Katerina Holt,” is the reply. “Katerina Holt is on the premises right now, wondering _why_ there is a stranger with her face. Just like we all are.”

“That’s… fair,” Pidge says, not wanting to upset the admiral any more than she already has. “I don’t doubt that she’s Katie Holt. I… look, I can’t tell you anything that you want to know. You literally just _won’t_ believe me.”

“I won’t?” Admiral Sanda asks, eyebrow cocked. Pidge suppresses the desire to roll her eyes at the obvious display. “Try me.”

 _The truth is going to sound so crazy that they’ll literally just kill me,_ she thinks, _but it’s all I got._ Maybe she doesn’t have to start off with the aliens and the spaceships, though. Maybe she can just start off at the beginning.

“My name’s Katie,” she starts off, figuring that’s as reasonable a place to begin as any. “I go by Pidge because when I was little, I overheard my mom calling someone a bitch, so I tried to say it, except I said _pidge_ instead and my brother thought it was funny. I have a scar right near my nostril because once I tried to pick my nose, except I went too hard and stabbed myself with my uncut fingernail. It was so gross.”

“Stop, stop,” Admiral Sanda says. “Why are you telling me this?”

Pidge tilts her head to look at the mirror past the admiral. “Mainly because I’m hoping my dad’s in there,” she replies, offering it a smile even though she cannot see what any reactions would be. “He’ll know I’m not lying.”

“Commander Holt will not respond to you,” Sanda says, curt.

Pidge really does roll her eyes, then, which earns her a glare mean enough to physically burn. “I _know_ how interrogations work,” she says. “It would be nice if I could talk to him, though. I miss him.” It’s true - she hasn’t seen him in any of the realities so far, and he would definitely be a help in figuring out this whole mess. “Can’t you at least have him come in? Y’know, good cop, bad cop? The bad cop routine doesn’t really work when it’s just you, you know. You need to have the other guy here to lower my guard and reveal my dark secrets.”

“So you admit that you have ‘dark secrets’?”

“Uh, no, not really,” Pidge answers, legitimately taking the time to think about it. “All of mine got revealed, like, two years ago. You know the first one, right? After the Kerberos mission-”

“How do you know about the Kerberos mission?” Sanda interrupts, eyebrows knitted together as if this is a great injustice. “Who gave you our intel?”

“What the fuck?” Pidge responds, which is probably not the best response, but whatever. “Um, my dad and _brother_ were on it? How would I _not_ know about it?”

Admiral Sanda pauses, or maybe freezes - Pidge is never sure when it comes to people as cold as her. “Tell me everything that you know about the Kerberos mission.”

“Oh, okay, jeez,” she replies, tilting her head back as she contemplates it. “Well, the crew was three people. My dad, Samuel Holt, my brother, Matt, and Takashi Shirogane. The total intended mission length was two months, I think? Dad made a joke about how he’d have to eat frozen peas for that long. But it was five months after they launched that they were declared missing. You guys blamed it all on Shiro - pilot error or whatever.”

“If the crew went missing, why do you believe that your father is behind that mirror?”

“I found him,” Pidge answers. “I dragged my sorry ass out to space and I found him. It took me forever. I thought that he was dead so many times.”

“I don’t know what the hell you are,” Sanda says, “but you’re sure as hell not Katerina Holt. The Kerberos mission never even took off.”

Well, that will explain the big mystery about it, at least.

“Oh, cool,” Pidge says, nodding as if she’s just been told that the weather is going to be seventy-two and sunny tomorrow. “Look, I’m not asking you to believe that I’m the Katerina Holt that you know. I know that I’m not. But I am _a_ Katerina Holt. Every part of this place is cammed, so why don’t you just _look_ at them to figure out where I came from? I didn’t sneak in - I just _showed up._ Unwillingly. God, you guys will let Commander Kerins bitch at all of us about the multiverse, but you won’t even consider the fact that it’s real? What, am I just some intruder that randomly has the same face, name, and backstory as one of your students?”

Sanda flinches, sharp and surprised. She leans into the microphone in her ear, as if she’s being given instructions on what to do. She doesn’t say anything else, though. She just walks out, leaving Pidge tied to the table and alone.

She’s not alone for long, though. After just a minute, she comes back, this time with Iverson and Dad. Pidge smiles widely at him when he comes in, and he offers her a twitch of the lips in return, but it’s hesitant. She supposes that that’s fair enough - he already has a daughter, and she already has a dad.

“Katie,” Dad says, and she can only wonder if he _believes_ her, or if he thinks this is all some weird ruse. He reaches out and touches her restrained hands, though, so she hopes that that’s a yes. “Tell me about space.”

So, she does.

 

* * *

 

They let her go.

Her wrists are chafed and red when they take her out of the restraints. Sanda apologizes, but it’s clipped and obligatory. Pidge thanks her anyway.

“Do you need a room to stay in for the night?” her dad asks, once they leave the interrogation room. “Or food to eat? More clothes?”

Pidge smiles, faint. “No, I’m okay,” she tells him. “I never stick around for more than a few hours, anyway.”

“What causes it?” Dad asks in his scientist voice. Pidge stares at her feet. “Your departures?”

“Sometimes, all I have to do is want to go home,” she tells him. “But sometimes, it’s without warning. There’s something I need to hear or see, each time. I just don’t know what it is that I keep seeing.”

“Do you have any theories?” Dad asks, and it sounds so much like some of the other versions of her.

“Not anymore,” Pidge says. “I thought somebody always needed to die. Last time, no one was dead. Is - do the names Lance Serrano, Hunk Garrett, Keith Kogane mean anything to you? Are they all alive? Is Shiro?”

“Er,” her dad says. “Shiro’s fine. I see Garrett and Kogane around sometimes, but not much. Serrano is, well, close to the family.”

“Oh?” Pidge asks, not sure why she’s surprised. “Friends with Matt or something?”

“Or something,” Dad confirms, seemingly unwilling to elaborate. It’s a lead, at least. “If you need information from ... your _team,_ I suppose, to proceed, Shiro is usually in the weights room at this hour. He brings that Kogane kid with him.”

“Thanks,” she replies, soft. “Uh, are you coming with me?”

“I can’t, kiddo,” he says, and he ruffles her hair as if she’s five again. “I’ve got a meeting. I’ll try and find you afterwards if you’re still around, okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees. “If I’m not, tell Mom I say hi.”

 

* * *

 

Shiro looks at her in what can only be described as unease when she comes into the weights room, nervously wringing her hands. It’s such a contrast from the last Shiro, who had practically cornered her and gotten all of the information out of her. This one looks as though he doesn’t even want to know. “I heard you might come to talk to me,” he says. “I don’t know what I can do to help you, though.”

Keith, who is lying on a bench press but not currently utilizing it, snorts. “He can’t help you because you’re crazy as shit.”

“Shut up,” she tells him, unable to feel too mad, not when someone with his same face has calmed her down from multiple panic attacks. “At least I can bench more than 205. That is still your max, right?”

He glares at her, though she can see the surprise beneath the expression. Hah, got ‘em. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Pidge grins. It would be _so_ funny if she told him that they get hitched in another reality, but she actually does want to use him as a resource before she freaks him out. “I know a lot about you. You just wouldn’t believe a word of it."

“Please don’t have a pissing contest,” Shiro says, voice wearier than his age. “If you have any questions, I can try to answer them. I just don’t know what will help.”

Now that she has the opportunity, she’s not quite sure what to ask. Without thinking about it as much as she should, she blurts, “are you still sick?”

He freezes. Keith freezes. Neither of them are using the weights anymore.

“Okay,” she says after a moment. “I guess that I’ll take that as a yes. Sorry to hear that. Um, hey, Keith, still got that knife?” Might as well check in on the fact that aliens _do_ technically exist, right?

He narrows his eyes at her. “What knife are you talking about?” It’s not a question, but a statement, and ooh, if she was still a cadet, she’d _totally_ be running for the hills right now.

“Your dad gave it to you,” Pidge explains, only feeling slightly bad for bringing up his family. “Where I’m from, at least. Do you still have it? ‘Cause if you don’t, that means that some seriously _weird_ changes have gone on-”

“I have it,” Keith says. “What do you know about it?”

She wonders, for a moment, if she should really be telling him any of this, but she supposes that no Kerberos mission means no space. No Keith hearing the call of the Blue Lion. This is a terrifying reality, once Pidge thinks about it. No space means no clone to stop Shiro's body from deteriorating. No Kerberos means no Voltron. No Voltron means no way to end the war. 

“Are you gonna sock me in the face?” she asks instead of answering his question. “We weren’t really friends before, but Lance always said you had the biggest temper. I’m not telling you jack shit if you punch me in the face.”

“I’m not going to sock you in the face,” Keith says, though he sounds like it’s a very hard decision on his part.

“Great,” Pidge says. “The knife is your mother’s. She gave it to your dad when she had to leave for a mission. She’s alive, and she loves you, but the only way that you’ll probably ever find her is if you go out into space yourself. Which you probably should, by the way.”

“If that’s some really roundabout and messed up way of telling me to go fuck myself-”

She just smiles, because it’s nicer of a response than she’d actually expected. “You can stay on Earth if you want, I don’t give a damn,” she says. “But you feel it, right? That there’s more out there for you?”

His silence is an answer.

“Well, you guys are boring,” she says, mainly because she doesn’t want to be in the same room as Keith once he inevitably goes into denial and starts yelling. “I’m gonna go find Hunk.”

(“Shiro, do you really think that she-” “I don’t know. I think so.”)

 

* * *

 

Hunk runs in the other direction when she tries to talk to him.

“It’s okay, buddy,” she calls after him. “You’re still my homie!”

 

* * *

 

Katerina Holt’s hair goes all the way down to her butt, even when tied into a braid.

Pidge is mildly impressed. She’s never had hair that long. Would she have, if Kerberos hadn’t happened? She supposes that this is answer enough, but it still feels weird. She’d been dying for a trim, before.

Katerina Holt grabs Pidge by the nose, jerking her face around as she studies her. “You _do_ have my nostril scar,” she says, mildly impressed. “Dad mentioned that you mentioned it, but it’s still kinda weird.”

“I’ve never been manhandled by myself before,” Pidge says. “Though one of them did throw a pen at me.”

 _“One of them_?” a voice asks, and she turns to see Lance, who, well, honestly kind of looks like a dork. He doesn’t seem to know quite how to act in his uniform, his movements overly exaggerated and dramatic. “How many have you been to?”

“This is number six,” Pidge says. “Most of them are pretty similar to this, but some are completely random.”

“Like what?” he asks, tilting his head to the side. He grabs onto Katerina’s arm, not in a protective gesture, but just because he seems to like touching her. Pidge follows the movement with her eyes, and there’s something in the back of her brain that is making connections that the rest of her cannot fully comprehend.

“Don’t dye your hair blue,” Pidge tells him, after a pause that’s just a little too long. “It looks better brown.”

“I would _never,_ ” Lance says, his free hand flying to his mouth in mock outrage. “My natural hair color is just too beautiful.”

Pidge rolls her eyes for what feels like the billionth time today. “This reality is so weird,” she says. It’s like seeing the past play out, except the past is also the present and also everybody is weirdly okay but also not okay at all. “I miss my death and destruction.”

“That’s such a creepy thing to say,” Lance tells her, and he’s completely right, so she can’t feel too offended. “You’re creepy.”

“Thanks, sharpshooter.” He stares at her blankly, and it takes a little too long for her to realize that the nickname probably wouldn’t make sense pre-Voltron.

He turns to Katerina, then, his hand slipping from her arm to her own hand. “Babe, your evil clone is weird,” he informs her, as if Pidge isn’t right there. Except she forgets to be annoyed, because she’s too busy staring at where their fingers intertwined.

Lance’s, dark and smooth. Katerina’s, light and small. They hold hands as if they fit perfectly together, as if they were _made_ for each other -

The dots connect, and Pidge is sprinting in the other direction before she can even think too hard about what it looks like. She hears voices: people are saying _Katerina_ but she’s not sure which one they’re talking to, so she just keeps running and running until she can’t see anybody else. Her legs are buckling and her fingers are trembling and, oh, God, how had she been so _blind_ before? How had she not noticed?

Kateryna having a photo album with so many pictures of Lance that it couldn’t possibly be platonic. Other Pidge bemoaning his unrequited crush on Lance. Those tapes with a Katie who looked happy in the softest way. A Pidge who died before her relationship could even truly begin. K and Lance against the wall, as if there had been nobody else in the apartment. The hands that she’d just seen clutching each other, as tightly as if they’d been doing it for years.

The constant has never been about death.  
  
The constant is Lance.  
  
Loving him, wanting him, needing him.  
  
The realization is comforting, agonizing, restricting and freeing all at once. She is not the only Pidge to go through this, the process of her heart no longer belonging to just herself. But she is doomed, utterly and horribly doomed, to love a man for the rest of her life who will never, ever love her back. It traps her, kills her, but there’s nothing that she can ever do about it because she never has a choice in the matter at all.  
  
Pidge can’t breathe. She can’t breathe because oh, God, how is she ever supposed to do anything ever again now that she knows that this is her fate? Getting flustered over Lance until the end of time, no matter how many other people share her heart or her bed, and knowing that he will never love her in return? Is that supposed to be enough for her for the rest of her life? Because it’s _not._ No, no, no. Maybe she can still fall out of love with him, and the constant is _falling_ in love, not _staying_ in love. Maybe she can still work through this and end up okay, and not tied down to some boy (even if that boy is _Lance_ ) just because the stupid universe tells her to.

She needs to tell him that she has feelings for him. She needs to tell him as soon as she gets back, and then maybe she won’t feel like she’s bound with rope at the hands and feet anymore. Maybe if she tells him, she’ll figure out how to navigate this, and things will be okay again. _This isn’t permanent,_ she tells herself. _You can move on from him. He’s not everything._

Except he _feels_ like everything. He feels like the world and the stars and the sun, he feels like everything that she’s ever wanted and everything that she’s ever _needed._ She knows, realistically, that feeling as though he is the answer and the problem all at once will not last forever, but it’s hard to convince herself of that when all of her emotions are so amped up. She’s tired and lonely and _in love,_ and none of those things feel very nice at all.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she whispers to herself, running her shaky hands through her hair. “C’mon, Pidge. You got this. You’re fine. You’re gonna be great.” She directs her voice to the someone or something that put her through this whole mess, and says, “you gonna let me go home now, or what?” Even though she’s asking, she knows the answer is yes. Realizing the constant had made all of the puzzle pieces slide together, and she _knows_ that her stupid, fucked up journey is finished, the same way that she knows the sky is blue.

At least it’s a pleasant feeling, knowing that this is the last time that she’s going to glitch out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one more to go until the end!
> 
> [p.s. if you're worried about a specific sad boy from one of the previous chapters, i'd recommend that you keep an eye on the series this fic is a part of. wink.]
> 
> p.s x2 i put a reference to one of my other fics in here lmao, free chocolate if u notice it


	7. shut up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge sees him before he sees her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fair warning there's 2 whole sex jokes so beware

_A hand wrapped tightly around her wrist, manicured nails against her skin, a voice that’s so familiar and yet so out of reach -_

_“I knew you could do it.”_

_…_

_“Please. Don't do it for him. Do it for you."_

 

* * *

 

Pidge’s sheets smell horrible, like sweat and dirt and stale chips. She doesn’t remember waking up, just coming back to herself in a sitting position already. Her jeans itch at her skin, sure to leave irritated red bumps later.

She’s in her bed in her parent’s house, her laptop in sleep mode beside her from the Netflix that she’d been watching that night. She wakes up the track pad so that the laptop will turn back on, and the date reads as the morning after she’d fallen asleep here. The fact that it’s only been hours since something that feels like an eternity ago is so bizarre that Pidge can barely comprehend it.

Her nails are still purple, barely even chipped, and her wrists are still rubbed raw. She's still in Shiro's sweatshirt from two realities ago, too, and she buries her face in the fabric. It smells like him, like those days where he'd promised to do everything that he could to help her find her family.

It had been real.

It had been real, but now it was over. It was over because Pidge had figured out that her heart beats only for  _Lance._

That’s not completely fair, she reasons. It’s not that she can never move on, and maybe, if she hadn't been thrown into this bizarre journey, she would have inevitably moved on from him completely and only seen him as a friend. But now, there’s _always_ going to be a part of her that won’t sit quite right. Lance is the _one_ for her, the universal constant, and even if she is fine with somebody else someday, will it really be the same?

Christ. Maybe she really should make a Tinder.

Not now, though. Now, she just wants to go the fuck back to sleep and never wake up again. She’s planning on doing exactly that when her phone on the nightstand starts buzzing. The sound jars her to the point of flailing, but she recovers, grabbing for it and checking out who it is.

“What the fuck,” she grumbles, squinting down at the _Lance💙_ contact name. He hasn’t called her in months, so why would he start now? Maybe it’s the universe telling her that she should get on with it already and tell him. Perhaps that’s for the best, so she accepts the call and presses her phone to her ear.

“Hello?” she says, slurred in her sleepiness. Her hands still feel shaky from her recent revelation, which feels like it had just happened a few minutes ago. Hadn't it, technically?

“Pidge, hey,” Lance replies, his voice distant as if he’s on speaker. She hasn't heard his voice in such a long time - in this reality, anyway - and something in her just immediately relaxes at the sound of it. “Sorry if I woke you up.”

“You’re good,” she tells him, rubbing sleep gunk out of her eyes. “I was already up. What’s up?”

“I’m coming to visit for a week or two,” he says, and okay, that’s completely surprising. He hadn’t even visited when Veronica got promoted. “I already made arrangements with the Garrison so that I can stay there for a while, y'know, help them out a little bit.”

“Oh, cool,” Pidge answers, because there’s not really anything else to say. Why’d he call her about this, anyway? She’s grateful for the opportunity to tell him what she needs to, though. “Um, we should talk about something, when you get here. It’s important.”

“Yeah, I need to talk to you, too,” Lance agrees, and she can hear shuffling in the background. “Aw, hey, fuckin’ _merge,_ dumbass.”

She smiles fondly at her sheets despite the entire situation. ( _Despite the fact that her heart aches, despite the fact that she knows his visit will run their entire friendship into the ground._ ) “Didn’t know you were one for road rage,” she tells him. “Are you on your way, like, _right now_?”

“Er, yeah,” he replies. “I dunno, I just had a weird dream last night, and I figured that now was as good a time as any, yeah?”

A weird dream last night...?

“Lance,” Pidge says, awkward, “either this is going to make absolutely no sense or make a _lot_ of sense, but was your dream last night… um…” There’s only silence on the other end as she scrambles for a way to finish the sentence. “Realistic? Life-altering?”

There’s a pause, and then, “you too, huh? Man, I guess we really do gotta talk.”

“Guess so,” she agrees, having no idea what any of this means. Was his constant the same - the fact that she loves him always and everywhere? Is he coming back down to the Garrison to start an awkward conversation about not reciprocating her feelings? “Um, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

“No, wait,” he replies. “Meet me tonight. I’ll get in around three - we can go out for dinner. My treat.”

This is going to be the nicest way that she’s ever been rejected, and she already hates it. “Okay, yeah,” she says. “I’ll meet you at the Garrison, I guess?”

“Sounds great,” Lance says, just as awkward as she feels. “Hey, look, I should probably focus on not crashing, but I’ll see you tonight.”

“See you tonight,” she repeats, not sure why it feels like a much more formal goodbye. “Bye.”

She turns her phone completely off after the call ends. She really does just want to sleep.

 

* * *

 

“Lance is coming to visit.”

Keith tilts his head at her from where he’s perched over his sketchbook, his arms hiding whatever he’s working on. He’s recently taken up drawing, probably to deal with boredom while on missions for the Blade, but she never really asks to see it. He seems too private of a person to say yes. “Okay,” he says. “Is that a problem for you?”

Pidge frowns, awkwardly sliding into the seat across from him. The dining hall is empty, more or less. Kinkade and Griffin are discussing something near the entrance, with the latter’s phone being stolen by the other, but she quickly loses interest and turns her attention back towards Keith. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Don’t you think that it’s weird? That he would disappear for so long and then just show up?”

“I understand what it’s like, I guess,” Keith says. “Being alone for so long that you think it’s the only way you can be. Maybe he just realized it’s not his only option.”

“Maybe,” she agrees, "or maybe he’s only here for a week and then he’s going to disappear off of the face of the earth again.”

“Maybe,” he repeats. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Pidge hums, unconvinced, but is interrupted by the sound of her phone going off. She pulls it out of her pocket, stupidly hoping that it's a text from Lance saying that he got here early, and quickly reads the notification. _You’re amazing! 2 people want to meet you! Open Tinder to see if they’re a match!_

Keith stretches his neck to see what she’s looking at, and then gapes. “No way, you made a Tinder? _Why?”_

“Figured I gotta get over Lance eventually,” she grumbles, not resisting as much as she probably should when he takes her phone. She'd never really told Keith about her crush on Lance; he'd just figured it out, with time. He opens the app, going straight to her profile as if there's nothing that could possibly excite him more. She’d made it on the way over here, so she’d just used her most recent pictures from Facebook - a picture of her with Bae Bae, a picture of her in her lab coat, and some others that Matt has taken recently. “I think the reason that he’s coming is because he found out I like him, and he wants to reject me in person.”

Keith looks up at her and frowns. “Well, if he’s gonna reject you at all, it better be in person. You deserve that much.” He swipes from her profile to the potential matches, swiping left and right before she can even really see who he’s judging. “Too redneck, is a frat boy, has 4/20 friendly in her bio, _oh my God,_ Pidge, look.”

 **James, 21  
** **MFE Pilot at Galaxy Garrison**

Pidge’s jaw drops. “Don’t swipe! Don’t swipe!” She takes her phone back with scrambling hands and locks it, not wanting to ever open the app again. She should just delete it, right now. Maybe she'll have better luck on Bumble. “That did not just happen.”

Keith is too busy cracking up, a sound that used to be so foreign but now just feels like an extension of home, just like Hunk's snores and Shiro's weird, sound-barrier-breaking sneezes. “Of course that asshole has a Tinder,” he says. “Aw, man, you didn’t even let me look at his bio. I bet it says _girls, please shave your arm hair._ ”

Then she’s laughing, too, until a thought sobers her up. _He’d just had a big stupid crush on me that he couldn’t articulate_ echoes in her head, loud and clear. Before she can even consider the consequences, she’s staring directly at Keith, trying to figure out if there are any tells that she’s missing out on.

“Keith,” she says, “you’re not secretly in love with me or anything like that, right?”

He jolts so severely that his pencil accidentally marks up his paper - she can’t see it, but she sure can hear it. “Um, no offense, Pidge, but _ew_?"

“Oh, thank God,” she says, and then realizes that she needs to make up an excuse for asking. “Matt was saying that sometimes you look all dopey and that he thought you might have a crush on someone. I was just hoping it wasn’t me.”

Keith smiles, then, slightly strained. “Though I’m sure that you and I would be an unstoppable duo,” he says, clearly finding the whole concept hilarious, “it’s not you.”

“Cool.”

(When she leaves, he goes back to doodling Hunk in his sketchbook.)

 

* * *

 

Pidge sees Lance before he sees her.

She stops right in the middle of the hallway, tablet tight in her hands. He’s talking in-depth with Commander Iverson, a box held closely to his chest. “Meeting’s tomorrow at ten, right? I’ll be there. Do you need me to do anything else before that?”

“Just make sure you’re not late,” Iverson says, and it’s kind of weird, hearing the two of them talk without Lance stammering out his _yes, sir_ s and Iverson not belittling the fuck out of him. Lance was always the one that got the brunt of the officers’ disappointment, back when they were cadets. She’d always thought that it was just because he was the loudest, but now Pidge wonders if he did it on purpose.

“Of course,” Lance agrees, and he twists his head in her direction. He freezes and just _looks_ at her, as if the mere action is what he came here to do. “Thank you for your help, sir,” he says, and it’s a clear dismissal, and the reversal of the roles is so baffling that her eyes widen when Iverson actually _leaves._

“Hey,” she says, scratching the back of her neck. There’s a tension in the air so strong that she can almost taste it. “Do you need any help moving your stuff into your dorm?”

“Nah, that’s alright,” he says, opening the door to his room. She hovers awkwardly outside as he places the box on the stripped bed and turns right back around. “I was gonna unpack it all later, after you and I, uh, go out. That okay with you?”

“That’s fine,” she agrees, even though she is totally not prepared for this. “Um… where are we going, anyway?”

“I asked Hunk for recommendations,” Lance explains, and she has no idea how he can seem so _calm_ when he’s about to tell her that he’s sorry, but he just doesn’t feel the same. “He said that there’s a place near the market that does a bunch of Earth stuff - Italian, American, Chinese. It’s supposed to be a hot spot for aliens who are new here, but I’m _dying_ for some pizza.”

“Pizza sounds good,” Pidge says, falling him through the hallway, presumably to his car. “Ooh, I wonder if they have margherita pizza, I haven’t had that in _years._ ”

“ _Margarita_ pizza?” he repeats, and she honestly can’t tell if he’s teasing or not. If he's not, there's no way she's telling him. “You’re not twenty-one.”

She thinks back about the vodka cranberries that she’d downed in K’s apartment, but doesn’t say anything about it. “I mean, if we count the three years we lost, I’m technically twenty. They’d totally let me use my ID, right?”

“Yeah, probably,” he agrees, and when they get to the front door, he opens it for her. She hates that she flushes. “No one’s gonna tell the Green Paladin what to do, anyway. Even if you _don’t_ have your ID. We should throw a total rager for your twenty-first, even if it’s technically, like, your eighteenth.”

Pidge’s birthday isn’t for another few months, so she narrows her eyes. “Are you planning on sticking around for that long?” Maybe Keith had been right - maybe he _had_ discovered that being alone just wasn’t for him anymore.

“I mean, maybe,” Lance replies, not meeting her gaze. She watches him as he watches the area around him - the cool night, dark with the beginnings of winter. “I’ve had that box in my car for weeks because I kept saying that I would come back and then … I would put it off. I paid off the farm, so I’ll probably keep the property, but I might not live there full-time anymore. Depends on how this week goes.”

 _Depends on whether or not our relationship is so frayed by you rejecting me that we never talk anymore,_ Pidge decodes, then criticizes herself for being self-centered. Maybe it’s about something completely different.

His car is more banged up than she remembers, (it had been brand new when he’d first bought it, specifically for the purpose of driving out to his new place) though she supposes that there aren’t many mechanics in the middle of the woods. She clambers into the passenger’s seat, marveling at the fact that the interior looks like it had just gotten detailed. Has he just barely used it?

“So,” he says, the second that he’s inside, “tell me all about your newest projects. And fasten your seat belt.”

She mumbles a _yes, Dad,_ and does so, not hesitating before rambling about what she’s been up to lately. Lance ugly cackles when she says that Iverson is trying to get her to teach a chemistry class, but admits that she’s the best one for the job. She talks so much that he barely has to fill in the silence, and maybe that’s for the best. She doesn’t really want to hear about life on the farm, not when she’s seen first-hand how _lonely_ he is. (Or at least, another version of him.)

“Fuck,” Lance says, right in the middle of one of her rants about Admiral Sanda. “Sorry, Pidgey, looks like the restaurant we were planning on is closed. Any other ideas?”

She frowns, not knowing much about the nearby cuisine. She’s been a bit of a hermit lately, to be completely honest. She eats at home or in the Garrison dining hall. The only time that she’s actually _ever_ gone out to eat since getting back was with Keith, right before he left for his first relief mission. She’d made a joke about Shiro’s old age and milkshake had come out of his nostrils.

“There’s a milkshake place two blocks away,” she suggests. “Burgers, fries, that sort of thing. I think they’re mainly drive-thru, though.”

“Fine by me,” he says with a shrug. “We can just park and eat in the car.”

Pidge raises an eyebrow, surprised by the fact that he’d let her eat in his car, especially when it already looks so clean. She doesn’t comment on it, though, because having an awkward conversation about their feelings is probably best to be done without prying eyes.

Lance is a good driver, but he drives as if there’s nobody else in the car. He stops a little too short and waits a little too long at red lights, not intentionally, but just because it usually never bothers anybody but him. It’s kind of sad, when she thinks about it, because he probably rarely drives with other people in the car. _Change that,_ her mind says, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like somebody else’s. _Hang out with him all of the time. Teach him how to be around other people again._

She can, and she _will_ if he decides to stay.

“Let me guess,” he says, before he even gets to the ordering menu. “No tomato or pickle, right? What flavor milkshake do you want?”

“You know me well,” she replies. “Chocolate’s fine.”

Pidge finds herself staring at him again when he orders. His whole body leans up against the car door, his right hand on the wheel and his left one brushing the top of the open window. She focuses so much on the tones of his voice when he speaks, trying to memorize them for when he’s not around anymore, that she forgets to listen in on what he’s actually saying.

“Chocolate for the lady,” he says, overly dramatic, and then, lips pulled into a smile, he says, “I should have known you weren’t vanilla.”

_What the fuck._

Pidge doesn’t really know how to respond to that, and she can see Lance visibly cringe as he realizes the joke that he just made, so she just takes her milkshake without further comment. She regrets not laughing it off, though, because the tense silence as he pulls into a parking spot is nearly _unbearable._ She kind of wants to jump out of the window and pay the Garrison to order a hit on her.

“Sorry,” he says after a moment. “That was weird.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, taking a sip of her milkshake to delay the inevitable. “But, at the same time, you don’t have to be embarrassed about accidentally flirting when you just found out that I fall in - uh, have feelings for you in every timeline, right?”

Lance does not look like he agrees. In fact, he spits out his milkshake so that it goes all over his dashboard. Pidge has half a mind to comment on how gross it is, but the words die when she sees the look on his face. “Repeat that, please,” he croaks, and when he looks at her, it’s as if he doesn’t know how to stop.

“Oh, no,” Pidge says, connecting the dots. “Oh, no. You didn’t have the same constant that I did. Did you even - did you even _go through_ what I just went through?”

“I did,” he clarifies, hands moving erratically as he tries to convince her. “At least, I think I did. All those realities, the glitching - that happened to me. It felt like a week, but it was just overnight.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers to herself, before directing her next words at him. “If me liking you wasn’t your constant, than what the fuck _was_?”

“You,” he says, as if it makes all the sense in the world. “Not you having feelings for me, but me having feelings for _you_! And I thought about it, the whole way up here, because I didn’t want to talk to you about this if I didn’t - if I didn’t _actually._ I didn’t want it to seem like I only cared because I was told that I would. I do care for you, Pidge. And I’m _sorry.”_

“Sorry?” Pidge repeats, completely thrown. It hasn’t sunk in yet, what he’s implying. “What the hell are you sorry for?”

“Because I haven’t talked to you in months,"Lance explains, sounding completely miserable. “I called Hunk and I called Shiro and I even called _Keith,_ but I never answered your calls because I was scared of what it meant. So you stopped calling and I figured it was for the best but I was so _lonely,_ and-“

“Hey, hey, hey,” Pidge says, slowly as she tries to soothe him. She puts her milkshake in the cup holder so that she can put a hand on his shoulder, and it has the desired effect, because he shuts up. “Communication is a two-way street, Lance. I stopped calling, okay? And it sucked, don't get me wrong, but... don’t apologize for needing time to mourn. I’m just thankful that you’re picking up the pieces again.”

He wipes at his eyes. “Dammit,” he mutters, shoving fries into his mouth. “I promised myself I wouldn’t have a breakdown until after we ate.”

She snorts, covering the sound with her mouth after. Then, he’s laughing at her for snorting, and then they’re both having a laughing fit right there, wrapped-up burgers in their laps and their mouths cool with ice cream.

It sinks in not too long after that.

He _has feelings_ for her. Romantic feelings. She’s had a crush on him for as long as they’ve _known_ each other, and she had been so sure… so _positive_ that he would never see her as anything but a friend. Him not having feelings for her was never the worst case scenario - it was the _only_ scenario. But here he is, saying that not only does he _like_ her, but that he does in _every reality._

“ _Wait,_ ” Pidge blurts, once she can finally breathe again. “Your constant can’t be that you’re always in love with me! In one of them, you were straight and I was a _guy.”_

“Well, in one of _mine,_ " he says, and it’s so confusing, imagining him in the same situation that she had been in, “I had to calm my lesbian ass down from a sexuality crisis. So, I think it’s safe to say that Lances tend to think they’re straight when they’re not.”

“Holy shit,” she says then, voice soft, “you and I - we…”

“Yeah,” he replies. “Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever considered it before. You and I, I mean. So if you don’t want to do anything about it, that’s okay.”

Pidge wonders if she’s been secretly really good at hiding her crush this whole time, despite Hunk’s teasing, or if Lance is just more oblivious than she had previously considered. “Lance, uh,” she says, scrambling for a way to finish the sentence that doesn’t sound desperate. She fails. “I’ve kind of been in love with you for as long as I can remember.”

Thank God that he doesn’t have milkshake in his mouth, that time, because his jaw drops so hard that it’s almost comical. “You’re fucking with me,” he says. “No way! Really?”

“Yes, really,” she snaps, feeling mortified. “Shut up.”

“You had a crush on me? That’s crazy!” He says it as if it’s the last possible outcome that he could have ever expected, and she realizes that it probably is.

“The universe - _multiple_ universes, in fact - literally just proved to us that we fall in love _every time_ and you find it weird that I had a crush on you?”

“Shut up,” he echoes, and then the amusement in his face twists into something else. “Though, um, actually, while we’re talking about like, love and stuff…”

Pidge raises an eyebrow at him and waits for him to finish. Giddiness is starting to rise up in bones, though, at the feeling of _holy shit, he likes me,_ so it’s hard to keep a grin off of her face.

“I don’t want you to think that you’re, like… a replacement for Allura or anything,” he says, sounding as though he half-wishes he hadn’t even brought it up. She kind of wishes that he hadn’t, either. “I loved her a lot, and, y’know, I always _will_ love her, but not … not the same way that I used to? I love her in a healthy way now: a way where I can let other people in, too.”

“I get it,” she reassures him. “If anyone you’re with in the future, me or not, asks you to forget about someone you lost, then you _run,_ Lance. You can move on without forgetting.”

“I know, I know,” Lance replies, and her cheeks darken at the realization that he didn’t really need that speech at all. Oh, well. Better safe than sorry. “Do you… do you think that she was the one who…?”

Pidge catches onto the part of the sentence that he doesn’t say. “I dunno,” she admits. “I’d like to think so.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Me, too.”

It’s quiet for a bit, then. Pidge finally unwraps her burger, reveling in the fact that this silence is not nearly as uncomfortable as the previous one. There are some awkward tensions underneath the air, sure, but they’re more dorky than downright horrible.

“Hey, um,” Lance says, mouth full of beef, “you didn’t really answer my question.”

“What question?” she asks, but at least she has the decency to swallow, first. (She almost says that bit out loud, but if Lance can’t be trusted with the word _vanilla,_ he most certainly can’t be trusted with the word _swallow._ )

“If you want to do anything about this,” he clarifies. “Us.”

Huh. She hadn’t even really recognized that that had been a question. “I’d love to,” Pidge says, gentle. “If you want to, I mean.”

“I do,” he says, then, and his voice is intertwined with something _warm_ and _comforting_ and oh, God, if she hadn’t been head over heels before, she certainly is, now. “Slow, though. Can I start by taking you out to an _actual_ dinner? Sometime this week?”

 _Slow. I can do slow._ She prefers it, even.

“That sounds great,” she says, and it feels as though a tension has finally, finally left her shoulders. It’s been a trainwreck of a day, one of the most exhausting she’s ever had, but it’s also shaping up to be one of the best.

Pidge doesn’t know much about the future, to be honest, but she thinks that it will all turn out okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOAH okay i'm so happy just to have this up and posted because i've never finished a chaptered fic before! thank you all so much for reading and commenting and enjoying, i'm really just. so blessed.
> 
> some quick notes: pidge had a few over dramatic "oh my god i'll never love again" moments, but i want to make it clear that this fic was never meant to imply that she and/or lance could not move on with time. she would have, with time, been okay and moved on and healed, but she's our pidge and she's dramatic, so in the moment, the reality of that was escaping her. (peep the 'unreliable narrator' tag that came into play like 4 times why is pidge such a drama queen) [same with chapter 4 lance --- he hadnt moved on yet, but god, a year is not that long after the death of a loved one. he just needs time.]
> 
> i know there's some of the who and the what and the why that wasn't answered - mainly because this was supposed to be crack and then i went In Too Deep, but i hope you can take it for what it is. i do have most of the answers in my brain somewhere, and they might even come into play for the future one-shot i'm adding to this series. (and by might i mean they will, definitely.)
> 
> much love!

**Author's Note:**

> no concrit please! xo


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